MEMORIALS  OP 

HUGH 
BENSON 


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MEMORIALS  OF  ROBERT 
HUGH  BENSON  BY  BLANCHE 
WARRE  CORNISH,  SHANE 
LESLIE  y  OTHER  FRIENDS 


MEMORIALS    OF 

ROBERT   HUGH 

BENSON 


COltyQSH 


2 

«r 

LesLie  &  OTHSR  OF 
HIS 


SECOND  EDITION 


New 
P.  J,  KENEDY  &  SONS 

44  Barclay  Street 


HUNTED  IN  ENGLAND 


THE 

ROBERT     HUGH     BENSON.        BY     BLANCHE     WARRE 

CORNISH:   P.  I. 

THE         CAMBRIDGE         APOSTOLATE.          BY      SHANE 

LESLIE.-   P.    47. 

ANECDOTES      OF      HUGH      BENSON.         BY     RICHARD 

HOW  DEN:    P.    71. 

NOTES  :    P.  84. 


A  PORTRAIT  IN  COLOURS  :   FRONTISPIECE. 

ROBERT  HUGH  BENSON  IN   1906  !    P.  9. 

A.   C.   BENSON,  R.    H.    BENSON,  AND    E.   F.   BENSON, 

1907  :   P.  17. 

AT  HARE  STREET  HOUSE,  1909  !    P.  25. 

IN  HIS  GARDEN,  191 1  !    P.  33. 

HARE  STREET  HOUSE,  BUNTINGFORD  :    P.  41. 

ROBERT  HUGH  BENSON  IN   1907  :    P.  49. 

AN      OPEN      AIR      SERMON      AT      BUNTINGFORD  : 

PP.    56,    57. 

H.    E.    CARDINAL    BOURNE    GIVES    THE     LAST    BLESS- 
ING :    P.  65. 

THE   FUNERAL  :    PP.    88,    89. 


Mrs.    Warre   Cornish's   contribution   is  reprinted,   -with  revision,  from 
the  "  Dublin  Rcvietv." 


ROBERT  HUGH  BENSON 

<BT  'BLANCHE   WARRE    CORNISH 


A  the  death  of  Robert  Hugh  Benson, 
in  October  1914,  the  personal  char- 
acter of  the  sorrow  for  his  loss  was 
very  manifest.     It  was  towards  the 
close  of  the  month,  in  the  hour  of  dread- 
ful suspense  when  the  long  battle  for  Calais 
was  beginning  ;   preoccupation  was  intense, 
and  English  hearts  were  absorbed  by  our 
soldiers   in  the    field.     Little    appeared    in 
the  papers  about  the  young  dignitary   of 
the   Church  who  had  passed  so  suddenly 
away.      And    yet    it    was    remarked    that 
thousands  who  had  never  spoken  to  him 
mourned  for  him  as  for  a  relation. 

Outside  his  own  fold,  brethren  and  friends 
of  University  life  or  of  an  early  and  suc- 
cessful Anglican  pastorate  were  drawn  to 
him  by  his  courageous  death  in  full  con- 
sciousness— or  by  the  amenities,  and  in 

A 


1(OSERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
the  case  of  his  brothers  the  comradeship, 
of  the  very  last  years.  "  He  was  always 
a  modest  man,  the  Monsignor,"  said  an 
impartial  and  gracious  Cambridge  voice  in 
my  hearing  at  the  time  ;  and  an  attractive 
writer  in  the  Cornhill  Magazine  bears 
witness  to  friendship  deepening  with 
Robert  Hugh  Benson  in  latter  years,  in  spite 
of  divergent  ways  of  thought.  It  appeared 
that  old  self-assertion  had  softened — the 
turgid  waters  of  extreme  opinion  ran 
clearer. 

Personal,  too,  was  the  nature  of  the  regret 
in  the  Catholic  world  ;  it  was  not  merely 
that  Monsignor  Benson  had  revived  the 
great  tradition  of  the  pulpit — the  success 
almost  of  Pere  Ravignan  and  P£re  Felix 
in  France,  witnessed  by  the  crowds  who 
waited  to  see  the  boy-like  form  and  fair 
head  appear  in  the  pulpit ;  nor  was  it  this 
book  or  that  amid  the  marvel  of  his  literary 
accomplishment  :  these  counted  for  little 
at  the  hour  of  his  death  in  comparison  to 
the  memory  of  his  faith.  No,  something 
intimate,  something  consoling,  was  in  the 
mind  of  each,  at  the  passing  of  the  great 
little  priest.  The  spur  of  the  Invisible  was 
upon  him  in  his  death  and  in  his  life.  There- 
fore he  interpreted  to  men  their  own 
sorrow.  He  was  a  mystic  :  he  taught  that 
2 


IIOBERT  HUGH  <BENSON 
mysticism,  the  vision  and  experience  which 
comes  in  passivity  and  by  silence — "  a 
silence  more  articulate  than  words  "  as  he 
wrote — was  in  the  reach  of  the  humblest. 
And  a  steady  look  at  the  man  was  needed. 
All  that  he  gave  to  his  contemporaries  was 
the  history  of  his  conversion,  that  it  might 
be  useful  to  them.  But  there  was  never  a 
word  about  his  early  life  in  the  world,  about 
his  life  as  an  artist  in  fiction.  Soon  we  shall 
have  many  side-lights  upon  him,  and 
ultimately  the  biography  and  letters 
promised  by  Father  Martindale.  It  is  here 
as  a  mystic,  an  Englishman  who  will  take 
his  place  amongst  the  true  mystics  of  the 
Church,  that  a  few  facts  and  souvenirs  are 
put  together  with  a  permitted  narrative  of 
his  life  at  home. 


II 

HUGH  BENSON,  as  he  was  always  for- 
merly called,  owed  the  name  to  his 
birthplace.  His  father  was  Chancellor  of 
the  Cathedral  at  Lincoln  and  lived  in  its 
splendid  precincts,  where  his  youngest  child 
was  born.  The  sanctity  of  St.  Hugh  of 
Lincoln  inspired  the  father  long  before  the 
son  wrote  his  life  and  spread  the  fame  of 
the  Carthusian  Order  that  he  adorned. 
His  first  name  of  Robert  was  used  by  him 
when  he  first  began  to  publish.  From 
Lincoln  the  future  Archbishop  passed  to 
Truro,  where  as  Bishop  he  built  the  fine 
modern  cathedral.  Devoted  to  the  wild 
Cornish  country-side,  where  the  Bishop's 
family  made  Kenwyn  Vicarage  their  home, 
Hugh — always  Hugh,  as  we  have  said,  in  his 
home,  and  Hugh  for  us  in  this  narrative — 
first  became  known  to  me  as  the  sheltered 
boy  of  a  dignified  and  simple  little  ecclesi- 
astical court  within  the  walls  of  a  country 
vicarage.  It  was  much  enlarged  by,  and  re- 
ceived the  name  of  Lis  Escop  from,  Arch- 
4 


<HOBERT:  HUGH  <BENSON 
bishop  Benson,  whose  episcopal  life  there 
reminded  his  successor  of  ideal  primitive 
Christian  days.  At  Lambeth  Palace  and 
Addington  Park,  the  ancient  houses  of  the 
English  primates,  the  character  of  the 
family  life  changed  little.  A  taste  for  the 
wild  country  found  in  Cornwall  expanded 
into  riding  and  shooting  and  wandering 
tastes  at  Addington ;  and  the  delicious 
topography  of  By  What  Authority  owes  its 
colour  to  an  early  acquaintance  with  his- 
torical country-sides  between  Tonbridge 
and  Canterbury. 

He  went  to  Eton  at  thirteen  as  a  scholar 
on  the  Foundation,  easily  winning  the 
scholarship,  but  not  following  it  up  with  any 
great  University  prize  at  Trinity,  Cambridge, 
where  he  graduated.  He  lived  for  his 
friends,  who  looked  upon  him  with  great 
affection,  and  for  no  particular  reason  with 
great  surprise.  "  When  I  was  with  him," 
explained  one  of  them,  "  I  felt  that  every- 
thing was  touched  with  romance  and  im- 
portance." Nobody  then  had  any  idea  of 
his  gifts  or  of  his  power  of  work.  It  was 
only  known  vaguely  that  he  had  written  an 
unpublished  novel,  and  that  he  was  en- 
thusiastic. Also  that  he  was  devoted  to 
music,  and  much  occupied  with  the  future 
of  opera.  He  wrote  a  libretto — which  was 

5 


1(OBERT  HUGH  BENSON 
to  transform  the  art — with  a  friend,  but  it 
was  never  finished.  His  virtues  and  his 
shortcomings  at  that  time  were  those  of  all 
young  men  of  the  upper  classes  who  live  in 
the  open  air  and  abhor  pretensions  to 
originality.  But  soon  he  was  to  find  his 
vocation  at  Trinity.  He  had  read  rather 
desultorily  for  the  Indian  Civil  Service,  but 
he  failed  in  the  first  part  of  the  examination, 
and  could  not  stand  another  year  of  cram- 
ming. Contrary  to  his  family's  expecta- 
tions, he  decided  to  read  for  Orders  in  the 
Church  of  England.  After  a  year  with  the 
inspiring  leader  Dr.  Vaughan,  at  the  theo- 
logical college  of  Llandaff,  he  was  ordained 
Deacon  by  his  father  in  1894.  He  was 
drawn  to  the  pastorate,  and  became  at  once 
known  as  a  promising  preacher  in  the 
famous  Eton  Mission  of  the  East  End  of 
London  :  then  he  received  his  full  English 
orders  whilst  still  curate  of  the  Mission, 
living  in  its  settlement.  So  for  two  years 
the  boyish  form  of  Hugh  Benson  disap- 
pears into  mean  streets,  crowded  rooms, 
jam  factories,  amid  a  nomad  population  of 
8000  souls ;  the  population  of  the  Eton 
Mission  was  said  at  that  time  to  change 
every  three  years. 

The  whole  tenor  of  mind  of  the  young 
University  man  in  his  first  pastorate  after 
6 


1(pBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 
theological   reading    is    represented  by   the 
verses  called  "  Christian  Evidences  "  : 

NOW  God  forbid  that  Faith  be  built  on  dates, 
Cursive  or  uncial  letters,  scribe  or  gloss, 
What  one  conjectures,  proves,  or  demonstrates  : 

This  were  the  loss 

Of  all  to  which  God  bids  that  man  aspire, 
This  were  the  death  of  life,  quenching  of  fire. 

Nay,  but  with  Faith  I  see.     Not  even  Hope, 

Her  glorious  sister,  stands  so  high  as  she. 
For  this  but  stands  expectant  on  the  slope 

That  leads  where  He 

Her  source  and  consummation  sets  His  seat, 
Where  Faith  dwells  always  to  caress  His  Feet. 

Nay,  but  with  Faith  I  marked  my  Saviour  go, 

One  August  noonday,  down  the  stifling  street, 
That  reeked   with   filth  and   man  ;    marked   from 
Him  flow 

Radiance  so  sweet, 

The  man  ceased  cursing,  laughter  lit  the  child, 
The  woman  hoped  again,  as  Jesus  smiled. 

Two  years  and  a  half  of  the  strain  of  East 
End  work  brought  about  Hugh  Benson's 
first  attack  from  overwork.  Archbishop 
Benson  died  in  1896,  and  Hugh  joined  his 
family  in  Egypt,  where  they  spent  a  winter 
for  the  health  of  a  cherished  sister.  Of  this 
stay  Hugh  recorded  in  the  Confessions  of  a 
Convert  that  he  received  his  first  vivid 
impression  of  the  visible  Church. 

7 


HUGH  <BENSON 
He  returned  to  England  to  take  up 
pastorate  work  in  the  country,  in  a  new 
curacy  at  Kemsing,  Kent ;  here  he  became 
closely  in  touch  with  village  people,  and 
taught  them  to  take  great  pleasure  in  the 
performance  of  religious  plays.  Then  sud- 
denly, in  1898,  at  the  age  of  twenty-seven, 
the  popular,  the  intensely  English,  the 
eager  and  excitable  Hugh  Benson  entered 
the  contemplative  life  at  Mirfield  with  the 
Anglican  "  Community  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion." It  was  founded  within  the  discipline 
of  the  Church  of  England  by  the  present 
Bishop  of  Oxford,  then  Canon  Gore.  He  was 
very  happy  there,  though  not,  we  understood, 
particularly  disciplined,  and  with  a  humorous 
pencil  drew  pictures  of  minute  monks  of 
Mirfield  with  all  the  gestures  of  their  well- 
ordered  day. 

I  shall  never  forget,  however,  my  surprise 
at  learning  that  Hugh  Benson  was  a  monk. 
That  he  should  have  left  the  line  of  pro- 
motion with  his  East-End  or  his  Kentish 
curacy  had  no  share  in  the  surprise,  because 
the  purity  of  his  spiritual  life  was  manifest 
in  his  preaching,  and  ambition  had  not  been 
a  motive  power  in  any  of  his  name.  But  I 
had  absolutely  no  clue  to  his  choice  of  the 
contemplative  life  in  a  community.  He 
came  into  the  room  one  day,  about  this  time, 
8 


1(0 BERT  HUGH  <BENSON  IN 


1(OBERT  HUGH  <BENSON 
unexpectedly,  and  threw  himself  into  a  chair 
with  the  exclamation,  "  Oh  !  how  is  H.  ?  " 
He  was  living  in  the  memory  of  Cambridge 
days,  and  "  H."  embodied  them.  Mirfield 
he  quickly  brought  before  my  eyes, — hill-top 
buildings,  from  the  windows  of  which  was 
generally  to  be  seen  a  pall  of  smoke.  Below 
the  pall  was  occasionally  discovered,  he  said, 
a  manufacturing  town  of  the  North.  He 
did  not  help  me  to  understand  why  he  had 
chosen  the  hill-top.  I  had  no  knowledge 
then  of  the  influence  of  men  bound  by  the 
vows  of  obedience,  chastity,  and  poverty, 
upon  the  toiling  masses.  I  had  heard 
wonders  of  his  preaching  and  his  young 
pastorate.  Now  he  was  spending  three 
years  and  a  half  of  the  very  strength  of 
youth  in  preaching  without  any  special  call 
to  the  masses.  He  was  thirty,  and  had  not 
uttered  any  original  thought. 

With  many  others,  I  was  at  this  point  of 
nescience  about  the  use  of  the  contem- 
plative Orders  when  I  learnt  about  Hugh 
Benson's  conversion  in  September  1903. 
In  the  following  year  I  read  the  first  utter- 
ance of  his  creative  thought.  It  was  in  the 
form  of  an  old  priest's  narrative  of  super- 
natural influences.  And  the  book  was  to 
touch  hearts.  It  was  to  reveal  his  art,  and 
make  men  want  to  verify  the  life  described. 
10 


1(0  BERT    HUGH    <BENSON 

But  if  I  had  had  The  Light  Invisible  in  my 
hands  at  that  time,  I  should  not  yet  have 
understood  his  need  for  solitude,  his  in- 
dividual vision  ;  it  was  only  later,  and  with 
her  who  was  "  the  heart  and  hinge  "  of  all 
her  son's  love  of  home,  that  I  learnt  to  know 
more  of  his — and  of  his  mother's — sympathy 
with  the  contemplative  life.  It  is  necessary 
to  speak  of  her. 

It  is  well  known  that  Monsignor  Benson's 
mother  received,  in  earliest  girlhood,  the 
education  of  a  man,  and  that  she  was  the 
only  sister  of  a  brilliant  band  of  brothers, 
of  whom  Henry  Sidgwick,  Professor  of  Moral 
Philosophy  at  Cambridge,  had  lasting  fame. 
With  a  great  household  to  care  for,  from 
very  young  married  days,  she  taught  her 
own  clever  sons.  When  Mrs.  Benson  lost 
her  finely  endowed  eldest  son  at  seventeen, 
already  a  great  scholar  at  Winchester,  she 
was  drawn  very  near  to  the  Unseen.  She 
had  ever  been  her  husband's  adviser ;  in 
the  hour  of  trial  she  was  the  inspiration  of 
the  mourning  home. 

Her  firm  Christian  faith  had  not  been 
formed  without  deep  inquiry.  The  most 
intellectual  age  of  the  world  and  its  philo- 
sophic influences  had  affected  her  in  youth. 
But  in  a  difficult  time  she  preserved  a 
dogmatic  faith  which  was  whole-hearted, 

II 


1(pSERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
and  therefore  useful  to  others  as  well  as  to 
herself.  Mrs.  Benson  never  wrote.  Her 
gifts  of  converse  and  sympathy  were  fed  by 
a  great  power  of  inward  silence.  She  set 
much  store  on  meditation,  and  practised  it 
all  through  her  active  life  at  Lambeth. 
Her  youngest  son's  first  call  to  the  contem- 
plative life  did  not  surprise  his  mother, 
ohe  personally  knew  its  worth. 

In  the  secluded  home  in  Sussex,  which 
was  hers  after  the  Archbishop's  death,  an 
expanded  view  of  Catholic  devotion  was 
welcomed  by  her.  Monsignor  Benson  has 
related  the  story  of  his  conversion.  I  am 
writing  without  any  book,  but  I  think  his 
first  words  following  on  his  discovery  of 
Truth  were  :  "  I  went  to  my  mother." 

In  her  house,  and  at  her  side,  the  inter- 
vening time  was  spent  which  elapsed  be- 
tween his  farewell  to  Mirfield  and  his 
reception  into  the  Church,  which  was 
quickly  followed  by  his  novitiate  for  the 
priesthood  in  Rome.  The  interval  was 
about  six  months.  And  the  young  preacher, 
already  known  to  the  world  as  one  of  the  best 
in  the  Church  of  England,  spent  a  time  of 
silence.  There  is  a  path  in  his  mother's 
garden  at  Tremans  known  as  the  Priest's 
Walk.  An  ancient  wooden  crucifix  is  set 
there  by  the  owner  of  the  house,  amid  many 

12 


1(pSERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
sheltering  yews.  The  Breviary  was  said 
here,  and  certain  of  the  Poems  written, 
the  simple  overflowings  of  a  full  heart. 
This  was  in  1903,  when  he  decided  not  to 
renew  his  vows  at  Mirfield. 


Ill 

AT  Tremans,  in  the  whole  vision  of  the 
-**>  Catholic  Church  and  its  impress  from 
its  Founder,  in  undisturbed  silence,  and 
with  the  fertilising  influence  of  sympathy 
in  his  home,  he  began  to  produce  with 
extraordinary  fertility.  He  was  thirty-two 
when  he  wrote  The  Light  Invisible.  He  had 
broken  from  controversy  like  a  young  lion, 
and  henceforth  stood  for  all  that  was 
positive  in  spiritual  teaching. 

The  historical  novel,  By  What  Authority, 
was  written  there  almost  without  books. 
The  Great  Keynes  of  the  story,  which  is  full 
of  the  charm  of  Sussex  names  and  roads  of 
fame  in  Tudor  days,  when  Linfield  was  a 
deer  forest,  is  the  pleasant  group  of  farm  cot- 
tages and  the  church  and  the  green  within 
sight  of  the  South  Downs  to-day.  It  was 
once  a  bustling  village  filled  with  news  of 
the  Great  Armada.  Tremans  is  the  Dower 
House  of  the  story,  where  the  noble  priest 
hero  came  to  his  vocation. 

But  the  quiet  catechumen  days  gave  place 
H 


1(OBERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
to  a  long  novitiate  in  the  burning  heats  of 
Rome,  where  no  seclusion  could  be  found 
from  fashionable  society.  The  cynic  that 
Hugh  Benson  might  very  easily  have  be- 
come in  his  hatred  of  social  banalite  was 
here  tested.  But  we  need  not  dwell  on  what 
is  so  evident  to  students  of  his  novels  :  in 
that  respect  he  never  quite  attained  the 
"  wise  indifference  of  the  wise  "  or  learnt 
the  "  scorn  of  scorn "  of  the  greatest 
natures.  At  the  time,  I  was  more  conscious 
of  another  lack — indifference  to  the  great 
arts  of  painting  and  sculpture  at  their 
highest.  Music  was  the  only  art  he 
recognised.  How  well  I  remember  the 
answer  to  my  first  eager  question  about  the 
Italian  stay.  "  Were  not  Rome  and  Italy 
a  perfect  delight  ?  "  No,  indeed  !  he  was 
only  impatient  to  escape  and  get  back  to 
England.  I  recalled  to  him,  a  thorough 
Englishman  from  boyhood,  his  delight  in 
John  Inglesant  when  at  Eton.  That  in- 
conclusive romance  took  the  reader  to  Italy, 
and  found  the  counterpart  to  its  aspiration 
in  the  churches  and  art  of  Italy.  I  did  not 
anticipate  what  a  John  Bull  he  was  to  remain. 
The  Religion  of  a  Plain  Man  and  The 
Letters  of  a  Pariah  give  us  the  exact  value 
set  by  Hugh  on  forms,  ceremonies,  and 
the  outward  things  of  the  Church.  "  They 

15 


1(OBERT  HUGH  BENSON 
are  just  nothing  at  all,"  said  an  Irish 
nun  to  me  once.  She  also  was  a  true 
mystic.  To  Robert  Hugh  Benson  the 
visible  forms,  of  course,  were  essential  as 
soon  as  the  inner  life  was  grasped,  and  they 
were  also  a  strong  help  to  the  inner  life  : 
but  he  was  too  much  of  an  Englishman,  and 
he  understood  the  thoughts  and  ways  of 
Englishmen  too  well,  ever  to  confuse  Truth 
with  aesthetic  contemplation.  His  novi- 
tiate in  Rome  lasted,  I  think,  a  year,  and 
then  in  the  Spring,  1904,  began  his  life  of 
ever-increasing  energy — preaching,  writing 
without  pause  for  measuring  his  success, 
neglecting  effect — "  he  was  not  out  for 
fame  but  for  souls,"  wrote  of  him  a  Francis- 
can monk.  He  interviewed  and  directed  his 
countrymen  and  Americans.  His  American 
tours  should  make  a  chapter  in  themselves. 
I  hope  we  shall  learn  much  of  them. 

The  editing  and  prefacing  of  books  which 
he  thought  useful  to  souls  was  a  work 
charged  with  his  message.  To  take  one 
instance,  his  Preface  to  the  Modern  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  the  book  of  a  convert  who  died  in 
the  same  month  as  himself.  It  sent  her 
highly  philosophical  message,  so  well 
pointed  and  carefully  fashioned,  like  an  arrow 
from  the  bow  when  it  is  directed  by  a 
powerful  hand.  Then  his  lecturing  must 
16 


C.   'BENSON,   5^.   H.   'BENSON,   AND 
E.   F.  'BENSON,  1907 


1(OBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 

also  be  passed  over  with  only  one  mention. 
The  lecture  on  Lourdes,  delivered  in  1914, 
so  memorable  for  all  who  heard  it,  was  no 
mere  outcome  of  vivid  impressions  gathered 
at  the  Grotto,  but  the  result  of  long  balanc- 
ing and  undoing  of  prejudice  created  by  his 
horror  that  men  should  become  Catholics 
for  the  sake  of  regaining  their  health  ;  fears 
clearly  expressed  to  me  in  1906,  but  after- 
wards dropped  when  he  had  himself  visited 
Lourdes  and  seen  how  the  Church  safe- 
guards it  from  such  abuse. 


18 


IV 

TN  1907  Monsignor  Benson  made  at  Hare 
-*•  Street,  Hertfordshire,  a  retreat  for  him- 
self. The  ancient  house  and  village  stand 
within  one  hour  of  London  by  rail,  thirty- 
miles  by  the  old  posting  roads  of  Bishops- 
gate  and  Ware.  We  have  his  own  descrip- 
tion of  it  in  Oddsfish  : 

The  house  without  was  of  timber  and  plaster, 
very  solidly  built,  but  in  no  way  pretentious. 
There  was  a  little  passage  as  we  came  in,  and  to 
right  and  left  lay  the  Great  Chamber  (as  it  was 
called)  and  the  dining-room.  It  is  strange  how 
some  houses,  upon  a  first  acquaintance  with  them, 
seem  like  old  friends  ;  and  how  others,  though  one 
may  have  lived  in  them  fifty  years,  are  never 
familiar  to  those  who  live  in  them.  Now  Hare 
Street  House  was  one  of  the  first  kind.  This  very 
day  that  I  first  set  eyes  on  it,  it  was  as  if  I  had 
lived  there  as  a  child.  The  sunlight  streamed  into 
the  Great  Chamber,  and  past  the  yews  into  the 
parlour ;  and  upon  the  lawns  outside ;  and  the 
noise  of  the  bees  in  the  limes  was  as  if  an  organ 
played  softly  ;  and  it  was  all  to  me  as  if  I  had 
known  it  a  hundred  years. 

19 


HUGH  'BENSON 
And  so  it  was  chosen  as  a  country  house 
to  be  enjoyed  for  a  few  days  in  the  week, 
when  every  week-end  was  given  to  preach- 
ing in  all  parts  of  Great  Britain,  chiefly  in 
the  North  ;  and  week  days  were  devoted  to 
missions  and  to  the  direction  of  souls.1  For 
some  years  the  house  was  shared  with  a 
doctor  friend,  a  Catholic  who  was  much 
interested  in  modern  psychical  healing.  A 
house  was  built  for  Miss  Lyall,  the  daughter 
of  Sir  Alfred  Lyall,  who  was  a  useful  critic 
of  the  historical  novels  written  at  Hare 
Street. 

The  chapel  of  the  house  was  an  old  brew- 
house  ;  its  crucifix  was  carved  in  the  house 
by  the  owner.  It  was  possible  for  the  two 
busy  men  at  Hare  Street  to  escape  the 
obsession  of  detail  which  is  such  a  snare  to 
the  novelist  and  to  the  man  of  science. 
There  was  work  in  the  gardens  and  the 
orchard — it  is  a  largish  demesne,  about  four 
or  five  acres.  There  was  wholesome  manual 
work  in  the  carving  shop,  which  enriched 
the  chapel  with  carvings  :  when  was  the 
contemplative  life  not  safeguarded  by  the 
labour  of  the  hands  ?  Music  was  never 
neglected  by  Monsignor  Benson  ;  his  writings 

1  Monsignor    Benson's    excellent   factotum    at    Hare 
Street  gives  the  average  of  days  spent  by  his  master 
there  as  two  or  three  in  the  week  ;  he  was  once  at  Hare 
Street  for  three  weeks. 
20 


HUGH  <BENSON 
are  full  of  it.  But  it  is  touching  to  learn  that 
it  was  in  the  hour  of  pain  and  exhaustion 
from  ceaseless  work  and  long  overstrain  that 
he  made  choice  of  a  Bechstein  grand  piano. 
A  pianist  friend  was  to  bring  Mozart, 
Beethoven,  and  Bach  into  his  home.  Nor 
was  private  correspondence  with  friends — 
always  brief  but  eager — wanting.  "  Such 
various  friendships — such  evidences  of  zest 
and  interest  and  fun  on  his  side,  and  of 
gratitude  and  affection  on  the  part  of  the 
recipients,  short  little  correspondences,  too, 
— opening  away  like  corridors.  .  .  ."  Such 
was  the  description  of  Hugh's  correspond- 
ence given  me  by  his  eldest  brother  and 
most  faithful  executor. 

My  own  share  of  it  was  in  connection  with 
the  work  of  Hugh  Benson's  dear  friend, 
Norman  Potter,  whose  Boys'  Homes  had 
grown  up  since  their  first  friendship  when 
they  were  converts  of  the  same  year — 
they  were  led  to  the  goal  by  totally  opposite 
ways.  We  were  selling  books  and  authors' 
autographs  for  the  Homes,  but  oddly 
enough  he  gave  us  no  books  and  was  very 
chary  of  his  autograph.  I  had  read  poems 
of  his  at  Tremans,  written  in  the  interval 
of  1903 — The  Halt  names  that  period  in 
one  poem ;  and  I  asked  if  the  Tremans 
poems,  as  they  always  were  named  by  me — 

21 


1(0 BERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
breathing  the  peace  of  the  place — could  be 
printed  for  the  benefit  of  the  Homes.  The 
answer  was  almost  a  cry  from  Hugh  Benson, 
to  the  effect  that  poetry  seemed  a  far-off 
thing  in  his  present  busy  life  :  he  should 
never  write  any  more  :  Norman  Potter  was 
welcome  to  any  that  his  mother  could  find 
at  Tremans,  but  he  was  not  to  be  consulted 
about  their  publication — the  urgent  business 
of  his  days  made  poetry  seem  remote  from 
him.  With  what  fine  literary  welcome,  and 
with  what  generous  issue  for  the  Homes, 
the  poems  have  been  published,  is  manifest 
in  England  and  in  America. 


22 


AS[D  then,  in  the  very  thick  of  the 
warm  charities  of  life,  a  sudden  silence 
made  itself  around  him  who  had  ever  taught 
the  lessons  of  solitude.  In  a  densely  popu- 
lated city,  on  a  mission  to  thousands  of  poor 
Irish  Catholics,  the  sudden  final  silence 
came.  The  Church  received,  in  the  first 
bereft  and  sorrowing  hour,  the  restrained 
and  impressive  narrative  of  Monsignor 
Benson's  death  from  the  priest  who  attended 
him.  But  we  must  go  a  little  further  back 
in  the  summer  of  unparalleled  events  before 
we  come  to  the  narrative  of  Canon  Sharrock 
of  Salford,  the  town  in  which  Monsignor 
Benson  died.  Hugh  Benson  spent  the  first 
week  of  August  after  the  declaration  of  war 
with  his  mother  and  with  his  two  brothers 
and  Miss  Tait,  their  great  friend,  in  the 
peace  of  Tremans.  A  feature  of  the  house 
should  be  mentioned  here,  with  the  last 
meeting  of  mother  and  son.  Mrs.  Benson 
had,  in  the  early  days  of  her  son's  Roman 
orders,  devoted  a  room  to  his  use  as  a 

23 


1(OBERT    HUGH    <BENSON 

chapel.  Here,  with  the  permission  of  her 
own  ecclesiastical  authorities  and  his,  an 
altar  was  brought,  and  Mass  said  when  he 
was  in  the  house.  (It  was  not  said  at 
Tremans  in  his  absence.)  The  young  men 
associated  with  Hugh  Benson  generally 
found  Mass  at  Tremans  at  the  great  feasts, 
and  a  kind  welcome  from  the  owner  of  the 
house.  It  is  of  the  Christmas  morning  of 
1904,  when  a  friend  riding  or  driving  over 
from  Ashdown  Forest  saw  the  lights  of  the 
chapel  shining  across  the  deep  lane,  and 
heard  Mass,  and  afterwards  received  that 
kind  welcome,  that  I  have  the  most  vivid 
.impression.  Surely  the  last  Mass  said  there 
in  August  1914  will  have  brought  a  blessing 
on  the  house  which  was  the  last  meeting 
place  of  mother  and  priest-son. 

In  the  end  of  August,  absorbed  by  the 
suspense  before  Mons,  and  then  the  stu- 
pendous news  of  ceaseless  fighting,  and 
stirred  to  the  depths  by  his  country's  unity 
and  heroism,  Monsignor  Benson  began  to 
compile  the  little  volume  named  Vexilla 
Regis.  The  ancient  hymn  had  furnished 
a  noble  title — The  Standard  of  the  King. 
The  volume  contains  devotions  for  each 
day  of  the  week,  following  the  ecclesiastical 
order  ;  and  the  choice  of  daily  chapters 
shows  Monsignor  Benson's  affinity  with  the 
24 


AT   HARE   STREET  HOUSE,   1909 


<HOBERT  HUGH  <BENSON 
prophetic  character  of  the  sublime  Scrip- 
tures, which  possibly  never  have  sounded 
so  solemnly  and  consolingly  as  in  the  most 
modern  and  most  terrible  war  of  the  world. 
But  he  was  not  to  correct  the  proofs  of 
Vexilla  Regis ;  he  was  not  to  know  the 
issue  of  the  battle  for  Calais.  He  was  to 
leave  the  world  of  strife :  the  world  of 
peace  was  to  come  suddenly  in  sight. 

Hugh  Benson,  according  to  the  testi- 
mony of  the  one  who  knew  him  the  best, 
had  always  wished  to  die  young,  and  "  to 
pass  swiftly  after  living  intensely."  But 
when  illness  came,  he  resisted  it.  In  early 
September  came  the  alarm.  Attacks  of 
violent  neuralgia  of  the  heart  made  his 
family  anxious :  consultations  were  held 
with  doctors  at  the  evidence  of  overwork. 
He  was  ordered  to  rest,  and  agreed  to  go 
abroad  in  late  autumn.  But  meanwhile 
he  worked.  And  he  had  at  heart  to  preach 
^two  more  Missions,  one  in  a  very  humble 
church.  At  the  obscure  Ulverstone,  a 
suburb  of  Manchester,  from  October  5th  to 
nth,  he  preached  between  the  attacks  of  pain 
and  once  in  acute  pain,  so  that  there  were 
pauses  in  the  sermon  and  the  congregation 
waited  motionless.  The  Mission  at  Salford 
followed,  and  of  this  attempt,  and  of  the 
noble  struggle  with  pain,  Canon  Sharrock  of 
26 


%)BERT  HUGH  BENSON 
Salford  Cathedral  is  the  witness  in  a  widely 
known  narrative.  Monsignor  Benson  sud- 
denly recognised  himself  to  be  very  ill : 
characteristically  he  threw  himself  into  a 
motor  car,  ostensibly  to  seek  further  advice 
in  London  from  doctors,  but  with  a  strong 
instinct,  all  who  knew  him  may  imagine,  to 
reach  his  brethren  and  his  home. 

But  it  was  not  to  be.  Pain  pursued. 
He  was  brought  back  and  laid  in  the  Bishop's 
library  on  his  return  to  Bishop's  House  at 
Salford,  where  he  was  to  die.  Here  Canon 
Sharrock  relates  how  pneumonia  supervened, 
and  how,  on  Saturday,  October  17,  1914,  he 
warned  Monsignor  Benson  of  his  danger  : 

He  received  the  last  rites  with  great  devotion, 
and  all  unbidden  made  his  profession  of  faith  with 
marked  strength  and  vivacity.  Sunday  morning 
saw  a  change,  after  a  restless  night  which  had  tried 
the  endurance  of  both  doctor  and  nurse.  He  was 
never  delirious,  but  his  restlessness  was  acute.  On 
Sunday  morning  I  gave  him  Holy  Viaticum.  His 
piety  and  devotion  were  most  touching.  He  made 
all  the  responses,  even  correcting  me  when  my 
emotion  caused  me  to  stumble  at  the  Mmreatur. 
On  Sunday  morning  he  received  a  visit  from  his 
brother  (Mr.  Arthur  C.  Benson),  which  gave  him 
great  pleasure.  He  even  then  informed  me  that 
he  would  be  quite  well  by  Tuesday,  "though," 
he  added,  "  this  hard  breathing  is  a  terrible  bore." 
His  mental  faculties  were  as  keenly  active  as  ever, 
and  no  tendency  to  mental  exhaustion  was  observ- 

27 


TtOBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 

able.  His  strength  appeared  good,  but  it  was  only 
too  evident  that  the  terrible  strain  on  the  heart 
from  pneumonia  was  beginning  to  tell.  Later  on, 
in  the  evening,  for  the  first  time,  I  abandoned 
hope.  He  spoke  continuously  to  me  of  his  friends, 
and  gave  me  his  many  messages. 

At  one  o'clock  on  Monday  morning,  having  left 
him  for  a  short  time,  I  was  hastily  summoned  by 
the  nurse,  at  his  request.  Entering  the  sick  room, 
I  saw  that  the  last  call  had  come.  He  told  me  so 
himself,  with  the  words,  "  God's  will  be  done." 
He  bade  me  summon  his  brother,  who  was  in  the 
adjoining  apartment.  The  prayers  for  the  dying 
were  recited,  and  again  he  joined  in  the  responses, 
clearly  and  distinctly.  Once,  when  I  paused,  he 
bade  me  in  God's  name  to  go  on.  He  stopped  the 
prayers  twice  or  thrice  to  give  some  instructions  to 
his  brother.  He  asked  once  for  guidance  as  to  the 
right  attitude  towards  death.  Once,  as  I  paused, 
he  uttered  the  prayer,  "Jesus,  Mary,  and  Joseph, 
I  give  you  my  heart  and  my  soul,"  and  joined  with 
us  in  its  completion.  Conscious  almost  to  the  last 
moment,  seemingly  without  pain,  he  breathed  forth 
his  soul  without  struggle  at  1.30  A.M.  on  Monday 
morning.  With  his  eyes  fixed  on  the  priest  he 
died  ;  it  was  just  as  if  he  had  gone  to  sleep. 

Who  but  a  faithful  priest  could  express 
for  us  the  final  solitude,  which  the  true 
mystic  is  ever  prepared  for  ; — 

In  such  an  hour 

Of  visitation  from  the  living  God 
Sound  was  there  none,  nor  any  sense  of  joy  ; 
Thought  was  not,  with  enjoyment  it  expired. 
28 


HUGH    'BENSON 

But  perfect  consciousness  was  left,  and  no 
dying  act  of  faith — more  precious  in  the 
sight  of  God  than  the  transports  of  the 
soul — was  omitted. 

Mr.  Arthur  Benson  wrote  to  me  of  those 
moments.  His  letter  breathes  lofty  sym- 
pathy with  all  who  strain  loving  eyes  to 
follow  a  leader  to  the  verge  of  the  far 
horizons,  and  he  has  permitted  me  to  quote 
what  he  wrote  shortly  after  : 

His  death  was  very  wonderful.  He  was  con- 
scious till  within  a  few  minutes  of  the  end — indeed, 
from  the  time  I  came  to  him  (on  being  summoned) 
to  the  last  breath  was  only  a  few  minutes — he 
spoke  several  times  and  joined  eagerly  in  the 
prayers — but  the  thing  for  which  I  am  most 
thankful  is  that  he  was  so  entirely  and  wholly 
himself- — brave,  considerate  and,  I  might  say,  adven- 
turous. It  was  simply  as  though  he  had  left  the 
room,  when  he  died — no  sense  of  death,  only  of 
life  passing  on. 

Some  day  I  shall  hope  to  tell  you  more,  but 
I  cannot  do  more  now  ;  I  felt  you  would  like  just 
to  know  this. 

It  is  the  voice  of  a  sincere  and  individual 
interpreter  of  life  that  speaks  to  us  in  this 
letter.  Mr.  Arthur  Benson  fitly  closes  our 
retrospect.  He  is  qualified  to  interpret  the 
original  movements,  the  elemental  character, 
the  himself  of  that  burning  soul. 

29 


<HpBERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
And  Mr.  Arthur  Benson  has  given  us  a 
word  that  lifts  up.  "  He  was  entirely  and 
wholly  himself"  Yes,  individuality  is  a 
link  with  the  world  beyond  the  grave.  And 
when  was  Hugh  Benson  not  true  to  himself  ? 
"  To  thine  own  self  be  true "  is  a  high 
command.  A  change  of  religion  implies 
no  remoulding  of  our  faculties  and  reflected 
impulses.  There  are  converts  who  would 
make  us  think  otherwise.  But  he  was  so 
much  himself  that  the  religious  biographer 
will  find  his  task  unusually  difficult.  His 
was  the  nature  that  cracks  and  breaks  the 
mould  that  would  enclose  it  stamped  with 
a  known  pattern.  True,  his  whole  Catholic 
life  was  the  logical  response  to  a  strong  ob- 
jective without.  But  he  has  verified — his 
great  word — in  Nature  and  in  the  super- 
natural what  came  to  him  as  Truth.  In  his 
death  this  true  mystic  tt>uchingly  verified 
the  struggle  between  them  of  which  he  so 
often  wrote. 


VI 

TT  is  not  our  purpose  to  speak  of  Mon- 
•*•  signor  Benson's  books  as  a  whole.  We 
cannot  attempt  to  estimate  the  strength  of 
the  cairn  of  historical  novels  which  we  have 
from  his  hand  dealing  with  the  history  of 
Recusancy  in  England,  the  top  stone  of 
which  is  Oddsfish.  Sufficient  to  remember 
in  passing  that  Robert  Hugh  Benson  con- 
quered The  Times,  To  our  astonishment 
we  read  in  its  review  of  Come  Rack,  Come 
Rope,  in  the  autumn  of  1912,  the  words, 
"  Why  do  Englishmen  ignore  the  history  of 
Catholic  Recusancy  in  their  near  past  ?  It  is 
such  a  noble  page  of  the  history  of  England." 
As  to  the  novels  dealing  with  our  own  day, 
we  have  even  less  power  of  judging  their 
durability.  He  wrote  them  for  his  own 
times  and  his  own  people.  Many  a  man  in 
society  has  said  to  himself  in  reading  his 
portraits  of  Conventionalists,  Sentimentalists 
or  Cowards,  "  This  is  me,"  and  has  directed 
his  life  afresh.  But  we  are  looking  for 
instances  to  illustrate  what  we  have  seen 

31 


1(OBERT    HUGH    <BENSON 

of  a  deep  and  true,  though  plain  and  un- 
exaggerated,  mystic.  We  must  leave  aside 
Richard  Raynal,  which  is  the  most 
artistic  of  all  Monsignor  Benson's  books. 
It  has  suggestions  penetrating  and  suave, 
like  the  hints  of  an  invisible  world  in  the 
pilgrimage  of  Bunyan.  But  it  is  so  mediaeval 
that  it  might  have  been  written  with  a 
purely  artistic  purpose.  He  was,  as  a  fact, 
full  of  his  message.  But  he  was  apt  at 
seizing  many  forms  equally  well  suited  to 
deliver  it.  In  the  Papers  of  a  Pariah  he 
speaks  as  a  child  of  Nature  about  to  be 
reconciled  to  the  Church.  We  choose  the 
following  passages,  because  they  show  us  a 
soul  very  attentive  to  Nature  at  the  outset 
in  searching  for  an  interpretation  of  life  and 
death.  Nature  was  the  schoolmaster  to 
bring  him  to  the  Church. 

We  take  a  realistic  description  of  a  poor 
paralytic's  sordid  death  chamber  : 

Here  was  a  chess-board  of  black  and  white,  of 
suffering  and  sweetness,  the  dying  man  and  the 
windless  morning  and  the  air  like  warm  wine, 
soft  and  invigorating,  and  over  all  the  tender  vault 
of  blue  skeined  with  clouds.  And  what  right  have 
I  to  say  that  the  board  is  essentially  white  and  only 
accidentally  black  ?  If  it  were  I  who  were  dying, 
should  I  not  feel  that  agony  was  the  truth  of  it  all 
and  peace  no  more  than  an  occasional  incident  ? 

32 


IN  HIS  GARDEN,   jgu 
Photograph  by  Miss   C.    Chichcstcr 


1(OBERT    HUGH    'SENSON 

But  the  dying  man  was  a  Catholic,  and 
the  poor  soul  with  scarce  a  glimmer  of  sense 
received  the  last  Sacraments  at  the  hands 
of  the  Priest,  and  the  witness,  who  was  not 
yet  reconciled  to  the  Church,  wrote  : 

It  appears  to  me  that  my  first  reflections  on  the 
tragedy  and  heartlessness  of  death  were  those 
of  a  stupid  savage.  .  .  .  Death  now  no  longer 
seemed  to  me  a  sickening  horror.  ...  It  was  as  if, 
after  a  couple  of  harsh  notes  had  been  struck  on  some 
instrument,  notes  of  brutal  irreconcilable  contrasts, 
another  had  been  added  to  them  which  resulted  in 
a  solemn  sweet  chord.  There  was  no  longer  that 
shrieking  inconsistency  between  the  mellow  day 
outside  and  the  death-sweat  pains  within  ;  it  was 
no  longer  true  that  a  Lord  of  Love  held  Himself 
apart  in  some  sunny  Heaven  and  tossed  this  heart- 
breaking problem  down  into  a  venomously  cruel 
world  ;  it  was  all  one  now  :  He  held  both  in  the 
hollow  of  His  Arms  against  His  quiet  Heart,  in 
a  span  so  vast  that  I  could  not  follow  it,  but  in  an 
embrace  so  warm  that  I  was  no  longer  chilled. 

In  None  Other  Gods  we  have  the  mature 
expression  of  Monsignor  Benson's  individual 
beliefs  ;  we  may  sum  them  up  thus.  First, 
in  the  silent  inward  revelation  ;  secondly, 
in  supernatural  influences  veiled  by,  though 
latent  in,  Nature  ;  finally,  in  the  power  of 
the  forms  of  the  Church  to  bring  not 
aesthetes  but  sinners  and  sufferers  to  free- 
dom, because  they  are  divinely  instituted. 

34 


1(OBERT  HUGH  'BENSON 
The  story  is  of  a  typical  undergraduate  of 
Trinity,  Cambridge,  who  is  the  eldest  son 
and  takes  his  father's  threat  of  disinheriting 
him  for  a  change  of  religion,  literally,  by 
simplifying  himself  like  the  Russian  nihi- 
lists, and,  half  gipsy,  half  ascetic,  takes  to 
a  wandering  life.  He  adopts  an  English 
major  who  has  fallen  from  respectability, 
and  the  young  woman  adopted  by  the  major, 
and  for  good  English  humour  this  sketch  is 
worthy  of  Stevenson.  The  wanderers,  who 
get  their  livelihood  on  farms,  find  them- 
selves in  the  laboratory  of  a  scientist,  a 
dogmatic  materialist,  who  believes  in  nothing 
but  toxins.  Toxin  can  do  everything,  said 
this  enthusiast,  and,  sure  enough,  it  cures  the 
Poverello — as  Frank  Guiseley  has  by  this 
time  become — of  tetanus. 

Here  is  a  problem  not  known  in  the 
Fioretti.  But  we  are  reminded  of  the  spirit 
of  St.  Francis.  The  ardour  of  love  that  was 
in  Frank  was  manifested  first  to  the  doctor's 
manservant  and  then  to  the  doctor  in  a 
mysterious  effluence  from  the  patient.  He 
worked  upon  them.  One  enthusiast  had 
met  another :  the  doctor  had  found  a 
positive  opposing  power  in  his  patient  :  a 
sense  of  intimacy  unparalleled  in  the 
scientist's  life  was  felt  for  Frank  :  he  had 
met  a  human  soul,  an  indestructible  spirit. 

35 


<I(OBERT  HUGH  <BENSON 
The  views  of  the  mystics  on  Nature  are 
defined  :  they  give  up  the  pagan  joy  in 
Nature,  to  receive  Nature  back  again  in  the 
sense  of  underlying  spirit.  No  theory  comes 
from  Robert  Hugh  Benson.  But  here  is  a 
description  which  must  appeal  to  all  who 
feel  the  objective  truth  and  reality  behind 
Nature. 

Frank  slept  deeply  and  well,  half  waking  once, 
however,  at  that  strange  moment  of  the  night  when 
the  earth  turns  and  sighs  in  her  sleep,  when  every 
cow  gets  up  and  lies  down  again.  He  was  con- 
scious of  a  shrill  crowing,  thin  as  a  bugle,  from 
some  farmyard  out  of  sight ;  then  he  turned  over 
and  slept  again. 

When  he  awoke  it  was  dawn.  .  .  .  Certainly  he 
was  a  little  stiff  when  he  moved,  but  there  was 
a  kind  of  interior  contentment  .  .  .  that  caused 
that  not  to  matter. 

After  a  minute  or  two  he  sat  up,  felt  about  for 
his  shoes  and  slipped  them  on.  Then  he  unwound 
the  wrapping  about  his  neck,  and  crept  out  of  the 
shelter. 

It  was  that  strange  pause  before  the  dawn  when 
the  light  has  broadened  so  far  as  to  extinguish  the 
stars.  .  .  .  Everything  was  absolutely  motionless 
about  him.  .  .  .  The  dew  lay  soaking  and  thick 
on  the  grass  slopes.  .  .  .  The  silence  and  the 
solemnity  of  the  whole  seemed  to  him  extraordinary. 
There  was  not  a  leaf  that  stirred — each  hung  as  if 
cut  of  steel ;  there  was  not  a  bird  which  chirped 
nor  a  distant  cock  that  crew  ;  rabbits  eyed  him  not 
twenty  yards  away,  unafraid  in  this  hour  of  truce. 

36 


1(OBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 

It  seemed  to  him  like  some  vast  stage  on  to 
which  he  had  wandered  unexpectedly.  The  per- 
formance of  the  day  before  had  been  played  to  an 
end,  the  night  scene-shifting  was  finished,  and  the 
players  of  the  new  eternal  drama  were  not  yet 
come.  An  hour  hence  they  would  be  all  about : 
the  sounds  would  begin  again  ;  men  would  cross 
the  field-paths.  .  .  .  But  at  present  the  stage  was 
clear — swept,  washed,  clean  and  silent. 

It  was  the  solemnity  then  that  impressed  him 
most — solemnity  and  an  air  of  expectation.  Yet  it 
was  not  mere  expectation.  There  was  a  suggestion 
of  the  fundamental  and  the  normal,  as  if  perhaps 
movement  and  sound  were,  after  all,  no  better 
than  interruptions  ;  as  if  there  were  some  great 
secret  actually  present  and  displayed  in  dead  silence 
and  invisibility,  before  those  only  who  possessed 
the  senses  necessary  to  perceive  it. 

We  follow  the  wanderers  to  a  farm,  a 
prison,  and  then  to  a  great  Benedictine 
monastery — of  forty  men — on  All  Hallows' 
E'en.  The  outcome  was  : 

.  .  .  an  extract,  taken  by  permission,  from  a  few 
pages  of  Frank  Guiseley's  diary.  These  pages  were 
written  with  the  encouragement  of  Dom  Hildebrand 
Maple,  O.S.B.,  and  were  sent  to  him  later  at  his  own 
request. 

"...  He  told  me  a  great  many  things  that 
surprised  me.  For  instance,  he  seemed  to  know 
all  about  certain  ideas  that  I  had.  .  .  . 

"  I  went  to  confession  to  him  on  Friday  morning, 
in  the  church.  He  did  not  say  a  great  deal  then, 
but  he  asked  if  I  would  care  to  talk  to  him  after- 

37 


I^OBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 

wards.  I  said  I  would,  and  went  to  him  in  the 
parlour  after  dinner.  The  first  thing  that  happened 
was  that  he  asked  me  to  tell  him  as  plainly  as  I 
could  anything  that  had  happened  to  me — in  my 
soul,  I  mean — since  I  had  left  Cambridge.  So  I 
tried  to  describe  it. 

"  I  said  that  at  first  things  went  pretty  well  in 
my  soul,  and  that  it  was  only  bodily  things  that 
troubled  me — getting  fearfully  tired  and  stiff,  being 
uncomfortable,  the  food,  the  sleeping,  and  so  on. 
Then,  as  soon  as  this  wore  off  I  met  the  Major 
and  Gertie.  I  was  rather  afraid  of  saying  all  that 
I  felt  about  these ;  but  he  made  me,  and  I  told 
him  how  extraordinarily  I  seemed  to  hate  them  .  .  . 
how  I  felt  almost  sick  now  and  then  when  the  Major 
talked  to  me  and  told  me  stories.  .  .  .  The  only 
relief  was  that  I  knew  that  I  could,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  chuck  them  whenever  I  wanted  and  go  home 
again.  But  this  relief  was  taken  away  from  me  as 
soon  as  I  understood  that  I  had  to  keep  with  them, 
and  do  my  best  somehow  to  separate  them.  Of 
course,  I  must  get  Gertie  back  to  her  people  some 
time,  and  till  that's  done  it's  no  good  thinking 
about  anything  else. 

"  After  a  while,  however — I  think  it  was  just 
before  I  got  into  trouble  with  the  police — I  began 
to  see  that  I  was  a  conceited  ass  for  hating  the 
Major  so  much.  It  was  absurd  for  me,  I  said,  to 
put  on  airs,  when  the  difference  between  him  and 
me  was  just  that  he  had  been  brought  up  in  one 
way  and  I  in  another.  .  .  . 

"  Then  I  began  to  see  that  I  had  done  absolutely 
nothing  of  any  good  whatever — that  nothing  had 
really  cost  me  anything  ;  and  that  the  things  I 

38 


ROBERT    HUGH    <BENSON 

was  proud  of  were  simply  self-will — my  leaving 
Cambridge,  and  all  the  rest.  They  were  theatrical, 
or  romantic,  or  egotistical ;  there  was  no  real  sacri- 
fice. I  should  have  minded  much  more  not  doing 
them.  I  began  to  feel  extraordinarily  small.  .  .  . 

"I  was  getting  all  wrong  with  regard  to  the 
Major  and  myself,  and  I  had  just  begun  to  see  that 
I  must  do  something  that  my  whole  soul  hated  if 
it  was  to  be  of  any  use.  Then  there  came  that 
minute  in  the  barn  when  I  heard  the  police  were 
after  us.  ,  .  ."  [Frank  went  to  prison  for  the 
Major.]  "I  couldn't  be  proud  of  it  ever  because 
the  whole  thing  was  so  mean  and  second-rate.  .  .  ." 
[The  girl  to  whom  Frank  was  engaged  took  ex- 
ception to  the  prison  and  threw  him  over.]  .  .  . 
Simply  everything  was  altered.  Religion,  of  course, 
seemed  no  good  at  all.  I  don't  understand  quite 
what  people  mean  by  *  consolations '  of  religion. 
Religion  doesn't  seem  to  me  a  thing  like  Art  or 
Music,  in  which  you  can  take  refuge.  It  either 
covers  everything,  or  it  isn't  religion.  Religion 
never  has  seemed  to  me  (I  don't  know  if  I'm 
wrong)  one  thing,  like  other  things,  so  that  you 
change  about  and  back  again.  .  .  .  It's  either  the 
background  and  foreground  all  in  one,  or  it's  a  kind 
of  game.  It's  either  true,  or  it's  a  pretence. 

"  Well,  all  this,  in  a  way,  taught  me  it  was  ab- 
solutely true.  Things  wouldn't  have  held  together 
at  all  unless  it  was  true.  But  it  was  no  sort  of 
satisfaction.  It  seemed  to  me  for  a  while  that  it 
was  horrible  that  it  was  true  ;  that  it  was  frightful 
to  think  that  God  could  be  like  that — since  this 
Jenny-business  had  really  happened.  .  .  .  One 
thing,  however,  Father  Hildebrand  thought  very 

39 


1(0  BERT    HUGH    WENS  ON 

important  (he  asked  me  about  it  particularly)  was 
that  I  honestly  did  not  feel  any  resentment  what- 
ever against  either  God  or  Jenny.  ...  I  just  had 
to  lie  still  inside  and  look  at  it.  He  tells  me  that 
this  shows  that  the  first  part  of  the  '  process,'  as  he 
called  it,  was  finished  (he  called  it  the  *  Purgative 
Way ').  And  I  must  say  that  what  happened  next 
seems  to  fit  in  rather  well. 

"  The  new  *  process '  began  quite  suddenly  when 
I  awoke  in  the  shepherd's  hut  one  morning  at 
Ripon.  ...  I  saw  suddenly  that  what  had  been 
wrong  in  me  was  that  I  had  made  myself  the 
centre  of  things,  and  God  a  kind  of  circumference. 
When  He  did  or  allowed  things,  I  said,  *Why 
does  He  ? ' — -from  my  point  of  view.  That  is  to  say, 
I  set  up  my  ideas  of  justice  and  love  and  so  forth, 
and  then  compared  His  with  mine,  not  mine  with 
His.  And  I  suddenly  saw — or,  rather,  I  knew 
already  when  I  awoke — that  this  was  simply  stupid. 
Even  now  I  cannot  imagine  why  I  didn't  see  it 
before  :  I  had  heard  people  say  it,  of  course — in 
sermons  and  books — but  I  suppose  it  had  meant 
nothing  to  me.  (Father  Hildebrand  tells  me  that 
I  had  seen  it  intellectually,  but  had  never  embraced 
it  with  my  will.)  Because  when  one  once  really 
sees  that,  there's  no  longer  any  puzzle  about  any- 
thing. One  can  simply  never  say  *  Why  ?'  again. 
The  thing's  finished. 

"  Now  this  '  process '  (as  Father  H.  calls  it)  has 
gone  on  in  a  most  extraordinary  manner  ever  since. 
That  beginning  near  Ripon  was  like  opening  a 
door  into  another  country,  and  I've  been  walking 
ever  since  and  seeing  new  things.  All  sorts  of 
things  that  I  had  believed  as  a  Catholic — things, 
40 


<HpBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 

I  mean,  which  I  assented  to  simply  because  the 
Church  said  so — have,  so  to  speak,  come  up  and 
tnrncd  themselves  inside  out.  I  couldn't  write 
them  down,  because  you  can't  write  these  things 
down,  or  even  put  them  intelligibly  to  yourself. 
You  just  see  that  they  are  so.  .  .  .  Well,  all  this  is 
what  Father  H.  calls  the  'Illuminative  Way,' 
and  I  think  I  understand  what  he  means.  It  came 
to  a  sort  of  point  on  All  Souls'  Eve  at  the  monastery. 
I  saw  the  whole  thing  then  for  a  moment  or  two, 
and  not  only  Purgatory.  .  .  .  And  Father  H.  tells 
me  that  I  must  begin  to  look  forward  to  a  new 
*  process* — what  he  calls  the  'Way  of  Union.' 
I  don't  understand  much  what  he  means  by  that ; 
I  don't  see  that  more  could  happen  to  me  ;  there 
has  seemed  a  sort  of  lull  for  the  last  day  or  two — 
ever  since  All  Souls'  Day,  in  fact." 

All  Souls'  Vigil  in  the  Benedictine  mon- 
astery revealed  to  Frank  the  use  of  the 
ceremonies  of  the  Church. 

"  We're  singing  Matins  of  the  Dead,  presently," 
Father  Hildebrand  said  in  a  low  voice.  "  It's  All 
Souls'  Eve.  Will  you  stay,  or  shall  I  take  you  to 
your  room  ? " 

"  I'll  stay,  if  I  may,"  said  Frank. 

Half  an  hour  later  the  ceremony  began. 

Here,  I  simply  despair  of  description.  I  know 
something  of  what  Frank  witnessed  and  perceived, 
for  I  have  been  present  myself  at  this  affair  in 
a  religious  house  ;  but  I  do  not  pretend  to  be  able 
to  write  it  down. 

First,  however,  there  was  the  external,  visible, 

42 


1(OBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 

audible  service  :  the  catafalque,  a  bier-like  erection, 
all  black  and  yellow,  guarded  by  yellow  flames  on 
yellow  candles — the  grave  movements,  the  almost 
monstrous  figures,  the  rhythm  of  the  ceremonies, 
and  the  wail  of  the  music  of  forty  voices  singing  as 
one — all  that  I  understood.  .  .  . 

But  the  inner  side  of  these  things — the  reverse 
of  which  these  things  are  but  a  coarse  lining,  the 
substance  of  which  is  a  shadow,  that  is  what  passes 
words  and  transcends  impressions. 

It  seemed  to  Frank  that  one  section,  at  any  rate, 
of  that  enormous  truth  at  which  he  had  clutched 
almost  blindly  when  he  had  first  made  his  submission 
to  the  Church — one  chamber  in  that  House  of  Life 
— was  not  flung  open  before  him.  .  .  . 

It  was  the  catafalque  that  seemed  to  him  the 
veiled  door  to  that  other  world  that  so  manifested 
itself— seen  as  he  saw  it  in  the  light  of  the  yellow 
candles  it  was  as  the  awful  portal  of  death  itself ; 
beneath  that  heavy  mantle  lay  not  so  much  a  Body 
of  Humanity  still  in  death,  as  a  Soul  of  Humanity 
alive  beyond  death,  quick  and  yet  motionless  with 
pain.  And  those  figures  that  moved  about  it,  with 
censor  and  aspersorium,  were  as  angels  for  tenderness 
and  dignity  and  undoubted  power.  They  were 
men  like  himself,  yet  they  were  far  more  ;  and 
they,  too,  one  day,  like  himself  would  pass  beneath 
that  pall  and  need  the  help  of  others  that  should 
follow  them.  .  .  . 

Something  of  this  is  but  a  hint  of  what  Frank 
experienced  ;  it  came  and  went,  no  doubt,  in  gusts, 
yet  all  through  he  seems  to  have  felt  that  here  was 
a  door  into  that  great  watching  world  beyond — 
that  here,  in  what  is  supposed  by  the  world  to  be 

43 


ROBERT    HUGH    'BENSON 
the  narrow  constraint  of  religion,  was  a  liberty  and 
an  outlook  into  realities  such  as  the  open  road  and 
nature  can  but  seldom  give. 

We  have  chosen  the  above  passages 
because  they  are  most  typical  of  a  creative 
mind  which  never  came  to  its  expression 
at  all  till  the  sense  within  of  mysterious 
grace  was  met,  as  in  Frank's  case,  by  a 
strong  objective  without. 

AT  Hare  Street,  on  his  death,  were 
found  Monsignor  Benson's  wishes 
about  the  burial  of  his  body.  The  grave 
is  in  the  orchard  at  Hare  Street.  On 
October  23,  the  day  of  the  burial,  was  the 
Requiem,  and  the  most  exquisite  art  of 
the  sixteenth  century  was  heard  in  the 
Mission  Chapel  of  the  old  house  near 
Buntingford — Palestrina  and  his  contem- 
poraries sung  by  the  great  choir  of  our  choir- 
loving  age.  The  music  of  the  Requiem 
echoed  over  the  lime-bordered  lawn,  where 
a  large  group  of  friends  stood,  unable  to 
find  places  in  the  chapel.  The  words  of 
one  very  near  to  him  describe  the  rite 
within  :  "  You  can't  think  how  sustaining 
we  found  those  great  and  simple  Rites  with 
which  he  was  committed  to  God." 


44 


THE   CAMBRIDGE   cAPOSTOLATE 


THE    CAMBRIDGE   APOSTOLATE 
'BT  SHANE  LESLIE 


A~ONG  the  few  though  pathetic  refer- 
ences to  Robert  Hugh  Benson  in 
the  well-stored  biography  of  his 
father,  the  Archbishop  of  Canter- 
bury, is  an  account  of  his  once  walking 
with  a  friend  from  Cambridge  to  Lambeth 
in  the  course  of  a  single  day.  The  return 
journey,  back  from  Lambeth  to  Cambridge, 
via  Rome,  proved  a  longer  and  a  lonelier 
progress.  Nevertheless,  after  many  toils  and 
travels,  he  found  himself  in  Cambridge 
again,  by  the  Pope's  favour  a  fully-fledged 
priest  as  early  as  1904,  but  without  "  the 
faculties,"  which  his  rapid  advance  in 
ecclesiastical  Orders  did  not  permit  in  the 
eyes  of  his  Diocesan.  As  in  the  celebrated 
case  of  Cardinal  Manning,  the  first  and 
necessary  step  after  the  Ordination  was  to 
take  up  his  theological  studies.  Accord- 

47 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
ingly,  he  had  obtained  Archbishop  Bourne's 
permission  to  spend  the  next  year  of  his 
life,  not  in  a  seminary,  but  under  the 
congenial  roof  of  Monsignor  Barnes,  an- 
tiquary, ex-artillery  officer,  convert,  and 
chaplain  to  Catholic  undergraduates  at 
Cambridge. 

The  three  silent  terms  which  he  spent 
at  Llandaff  House — the  ancient  Cambridge 
residence  of  an  absentee  Bishop  of  that 
See — were  not  the  least  strenuous  of  his  life, 
though  he  was  comparatively  unknown .  The 
splash  of  his  conversion  no  longer  eddied 
the  Church  Times.  A  first  rumour,  that 
he  had  been  sent  by  the  Inquisition  to 
Cambridge  ostensibly  for  his  holidays  but 
intentionally  to  pervert  the  evangelic  youth, 
died  down,  for  he  loyally  obeyed  his  Arch- 
bishop's injunction  not  to  practise  the 
pastoral  side  of  theology  before  he  had 
acquired  the  doctrinal.  He  did  no  more 
than  rejoin  old  College  societies  like  the 
Decemviri — a  species  of  Club  for  male 
"  blue-stockings  " — but  he  seemed  to  afford 
only  another  instance  of  the  pious  obscurity 
to  which  Rome  relegates  her  newly  initiated. 
Still  he  was  testing  and  perfecting  himself 
all  the  while.  At  8.30  every  morning  he 
said  his  Mass  in  the  old  ballroom  of  the 
Bishop  of  Llandaff — a  situation  that  was  not 
48 


1(0 BERT  HUGH  "BENSON  IN  7907 
Photograph  by  Basei>i 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
lost  on  his  sense  of  humour.  The  re- 
mainder of  the  day  he  spent  reading  theo- 
logy and  laboriously  compiling  his  early 
books.  The  Light  Invisible  was  already  on 
many  Anglican  shelves.  He  was  now  en- 
grossed in  writing  The  Queen's  Tragedy  and 
The  Mirror  of  Shalott,  though  they  were 
not  published  till  later.  The  Catholic 
ghost  stories  of  The  Mirror  of  Shalott  were 
read  when  written  to  the  superintendent 
of  his  studies,  who  declined  to  offer  en- 
couragement. But  when  he  retailed  them 
by  firelight  in  the  rooms  of  undergraduates, 
his  success  was  enormous.  His  only  rival 
was  the  Provost  of  King's,  whose  Ghost 
Stories  of  an  Antiquary  were  being  read  to 
nervous  listeners  at  the  time.  During  the 
daylight  he  made  no  appearances  except  for 
meals,  which  he  ate  in  self-imposed  silence. 
In  the  evenings  he  used  to  discuss  his  past 
and  probe  wonderingly  into  the  future. 
For  regular  parish  combat  he  felt  no  par- 
ticular ability.  The  Battle  of  Books  lured 
him. 

He  had  not  yet  developed  the  literary 
powers  which  he  hoped  some  original- 
minded  Ordinary  would  allow  him  to  exert 
as  a  free-lance.  In  one  of  his  most  sanguine 
moments,  he  designed  a  kind  of  religious 
Hostel  for  cranks  of  every  religious  and 

50 


THE     CAMBRIDGE     JPOSTOLATE 

artistic  tendency,  for  nothing  less  than  the 
great  Order  of  the  Misunderstood.  His 
associates  in  this  enterprise  were  to  live  a 
semi-Carthusian  existence,  each  writing  or 
painting  in  his  proper  cell,  and  only  meeting 
in  the  chapel  or  the  central  hall,  which,  for 
the  benefit  of  the  weaker  brethren,  was  to 
be  furnished  with  a  music  gallery.  His 
chief  reason  for  taking  so  feverishly  to 
literature  was  in  order  to  raise  the  necessary 
funds  for  this  scheme.  "  For  I  am  thirty- 
three  already,"  he  used  to  say,  "  and  nobody 
writes  anything  after  he  is  forty " — an 
opinion  which  his  host  controverted,  but 
in  vain.  Hugh  Benson  knew  that  his  life's 
work  would  be  largely  finished  by  the  time 
he  was  forty.  It  was  the  span  of  life  he 
had  set  himself  to  live. 


II 

A  YEAR  of  hard  work  and  of  dreaming 
came  to  an  end,  and  Father  Benson 
offered  himself  to  the  Rector  of  Cambridge 
in  the  capacity  of  a  new  Curate.  With 
Monsignor  Scott  must  always  lie  the  credit 
of  launching  him  as  a  preacher  and  mis- 
sioner.  He  had  the  foresight  to  see  in 
the  applicant  a  valuable  link  between  the 
University  and  the  Mission  ;  and,  in  spite 
of  the  flutter  of  surprise  which  was  felt  in 
the  Diocese,  he  accepted  him.  The  local 
objections  were  twofold  :  on  the  part  of  the 
Catholics,  who  felt  certain  that  Father 
Benson  could  not  know  enough  theology, 
and  on  the  part  of  Anglicans,  who  were 
afraid  he  knew  too  much.  It  was  queried 
whether  Monsignor  Scott  had  shown  a 
laudable  taste  in  accepting  the  service  of 
one  who  had  preached  as  a  parson  in 
Cambridge  a  bare  two  years  previously. 
But  the  kindly  old  man  knew  his  choice, 
and  right  well  was  his  paternal  care  repaid 
in  the  years  to  come.  On  one  occasion 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOL4TE 
only  had  he  cause  to  point  out  a  dubious 
point  of  theology  in  one  of  his  protege's 
sermons,  for  he  always  made  a  point  of 
hearing  and  enjoying  them  himself.  "  Then 
I  will  never  preach  theological  sermons 
again,"  cried  Benson  ;  and  he  never  did. 
It  was  in  October  1905  that  he  launched 
himself  on  the  mission  he  had  carefully 
planned  during  his  year  of  study  and 
reflection.  He  had  become  convinced  of 
the  irreligious  and  materialistic  atmosphere 
of  Cambridge,  which,  he  used  to  com- 
plain, weighed  upon  him  like  lead,  and  he 
had  made  up  his  mind  to  lift  his  thin  but 
denunciatory  voice  at  the  gates  of  that 
mathematical  city.  To  association  and  atmos- 
phere he  was  always  as  sensitive  as  an  artist 
to  line  and  colour,  and  he  used  to  say  that 
it  was  the  unseen  pressure  of  materialism 
which  finally  drove  him  out  of  Cambridge. 

Nevertheless  he  did  stout  battle  against 
her  fogs  while  he  was  there.  His  berth 
resembled  that  of  a  consul  in  foreign  parts 
who  is  suspected  of  trying  to  naturalise 
the  natives  surreptitiously.  He  was  not 
recognised  properly  by  Town  or  by  Gown, 
though  he  stood  in  relations  to  both.  He 
was  as  far  removed  from  the  broad  spirit 
of  University  thought  as  from  the  petty 
parochialism  of  the  locality.  As  the  self- 

53 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
appointed  champion,  though  not  the  official 
representative,  of  Rome  in  the  capital  of 
East  Anglican  Puritanism,  his  position  be- 
came naturally  isolated.  It  was  a  pity  that 
his  literary  wrestlings  with  Tudorism  never 
allowed  him  to  deal  historically  with  the 
Cromwellianism  of  which  Cambridge  was 
the  cradle.  Nevertheless  he  scented  the  old 
Round-headed  and  Iron-sided  mysticism  in 
the  watered  form  of  a  Christianity  which 
was  alternately  "  revivalist  "  or  "  muscular." 
It  was  the  conviction  that  he  was  up 
against  the  ramparts  of  English  Protest- 
antism that  lent  his  early  sermons  their 
vim — and,  it  must  be  added,  their  vindic- 
tiveness.  Suddenly,  and  without  warning, 
a  quavering  but  fearless  voice  was  heard 
crying  in  the  Cambridge  desert,  criticising 
every  chink  in  the  Anglican  armour  and 
testifying  most  whole-heartedly  to  the 
supreme  excellences  of  the  Bishop  of 
Rome.  The  situation  was  sufficiently 
piquant  to  send  ripples  down  the  stationary 
backwaters  of  collegial  existence. 

The  religion  of  the  normal  undergradu- 
ate at  that  date  was  exactly  hit  off  by 
him  when  he  wrote  :  "  To  be  a  professed 
unbeliever  was  bad  form — it  was  like  being 
a  little  Englander  or  a  Radical ;  to  be  pious 
was  equally  bad  form — it  resembled  a 
54 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
violent  devotion  to  the  Union  Jack."  On 
the  whole,  he  probably  acted  as  much  as 
a  tonic  as  an  antidote  to  the  Established 
Creed.  Certainly,  when  he  left  Cambridge, 
Anglican  lethargy  was  a  thing  of  the  past. 
His  sermons  lay  under  two  categories — 
the  mystical  and  the  controversial.  The 
former  were  certainly  the  more  soothing, 
especially  his  wonderful  treatment  of  the 
Water  and  Wine  at  Cana,  which  lingered 
in  the  memory  long  after  his  Petrine  shafts 
had  broken  against  each  other.  Not  that 
he  failed  to  be  effective  after  the  manner  of 
any  bold  bowman,  but  that  he  more  often 
left  the  sting  of  exasperation  than  the 
wound  of  conviction  amongst  his  Anglican 
hearers.  Doubtless  it  was  intensely  annoy- 
ing to  be  told  that  if  St.  Peter  did  not  wear 
a  tiara,  it  was  equally  difficult  to  imagine 
Titus  singing  evensong  in  G  in  Ely  Cathe- 
dral. At  a  first  hearing,  many  were  in- 
clined to  sum  him  up  in  the  single  word 
"  Hysterics  !  "  but  a  closer  following  showed 
an  earnestness  and  a  consistency  in  his 
apparently  ex-tempore  invective.  What  it 
came  to  was,  that  his  emotional  idiosyn- 
crasy and  personality  had  become  wholly 
and  entirely  steeped  in  the  most  unique 
religious  system  that  is  known  to  man. 
The  beauty  of  Rome  had  eaten  him  up. 

55 


AN   OPEN  AIR   SERfl 
The  occasion  -was  the  laying  of  the  Foundat 


'  AT  WUNTINGFORD 

ttone  of  the  nrw  Church,  May  16, 


Ill 

DURING  this  time  he  lived  in  the 
Catholic  Rectory,  behind  the  great 
cedar  tree  that  grows  at  the  nave  of  the 
immense  Gothic  edifice  which  every  traveller 
passes  on  his  way  from  the  station.  Like 
a  mighty  riddle  in  stone,  that  church  con- 
fronts each  arriving  freshman,  and  when 
he  departs,  forms  his  last  glimpse  of  Cam- 
bridge. In  this  cathedral  setting,  Father 
Benson  said  his  lonely  Mass  every  day. 
His  parochial  work  was  confined  to  a  few 
poor  folk  whom  he  visited  and  consoled  in 
emergency,  but  his  whole  strength  went 
into  his  fingers  as  a  writer  and  into  his 
tongue  as  a  preacher.  His  mercurial  de- 
velopment was  fostered  by  alternate 
bursts  of  writing  and  of  preaching.  At 
times  he  became  so  possessed  by  his  literary 
work  that  his  characters  were  often  more 
vivid  to  him  than  the  men  who  lived  in  the 
house.  Once  he  came  downstairs  in  the 
greatest  agitation,  saying  :  "  I  am  so 
frightened.  There's  a  man  committing 
58 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
suicide  in  my  room ! "  His  imaginative 
power  was  constantly  on  the  qui  vive. 
Colour  could  produce  the  greatest  effect 
upon  him,  not  so  much  as  colour,  but  as 
part  of  the  general  mysticism  of  things. 
He  used  to  explain  that  the  beauty  of  a 
cardinal's  crimson  did  not  lie  in  its 
imperial  rouge,  but  in  that  "  it  repre- 
sented the  b-b-blood  royal  of  Christ." 
Once  after  a  Requiem  service,  at  which  a 
pall  of  black  and  yellow  had  been  used,  he 
was  unable  to  say  anything  except,  "  Black 
and  yellow — black  and  yellow,"  and  from 
that  impression  his  liturgico-mystical 
Papers  of  a  Pariah  had  birth.  He  re- 
tired immediately  to  his  room,  and  wrote 
the  first  chapter,  which  begins :  "  This 
morning  I  assisted  at  one  of  the  most 
impressive  dramas  in  the  world — I  mean  the 
solemn  Requiem  Mass."  And  it  was  with 
the  real  impressions  of  the  morning  still  in 
his  mind  that  he  wrote  a  few  pages 
further  on  :  "I  despair  of  making  clear,  to 
those  who  cannot  see  it  for  themselves,  the 
indescribably  terrible  combination  of  the 
colours  of  yellow  and  black,  the  deathliness 
of  the  contrast  between  flames  and  the 
unbleached  wax  from  which  they  rise.  .  .  ." 
It  was  in  his  evenings  that  he  could 
be  generally  found  by  inquirers.  One 

59 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
passage  in  The  Sentimentalists  memorises 
the  echo  of  those  moments  :  "A  tram  a 
hundred  yards  away  boomed  up  from  St. 
Andrew's  Street,  grew  yet  more  resonant, 
punctuated  by  the  horses'  hoofs,  and  died 
away  again  up  the  Hill's  Road.  The  clock 
chimed  out  its  little  plain-song  melody.  .  .  ." 
Anybody  who  ever  visited  Father  Benson 
by  night  to  discuss  the  immortality  of  the 
soul,  or  the  liturgical  colour  of  trout-flies, 
must  remember  the  half-hourly  tram  and 
the  quarterly  chime.  The  horse-teams  of 
Cambridge  are  already  a  thing  of  the  past ; 
but  the  peal  of  the  bells  in  the  Catholic 
Church  will  long  ring  as  exquisitely  as  when 
they  helped  Father  Benson  to  write  his 
paragraphs  against  time.  The  room  in 
which  he  worked  finds  its  description,  even 
unto  minuti<z,  in  that  occupied  by  Monsignor 
Yolland  in  The  Sentimentalists  :  "  A  Louis 
Quinze  table,  two  pairs  of  antlers  over  the 
fire,  a  Khalim  hearth-rug,  a  grave  leather- 
fringed  bookshelf,  filled  with  miscellaneous 
books — Stevenson,  Henry  Kingsley,  some 
suspiciously  clean  editions  of  the  Fathers 
of  the  Church,  works  on  travel  and  sport 
— a  pair  of  silver  candle-sticks  on  a  carved 
coffin-stool." 

As  he  called  it  himself,  it  was  "  a  palimp- 
sest." 
60 


IV 

IN  these  marked  surroundings  he  re- 
ceived the  worshipping  and  worshipful 
company  of  "  Bensonians."  Here  they  were 
guided  spiritually  and  entertained  mentally. 
Here  they  were  themselves  observed  and 
sometimes  reduced  to  literary  shapes,  which, 
whether  composite  or  individual,  by  the 
time  they  reached  his  pages,  were  not 
without  certain  touches  and  changes,  which 
it  must  be  agreed  always  erred  on  the  side 
of  the  benevolent  as  well  as  of  the  pictur- 
esque. But  his  Cambridge  characters  were 
nevertheless  recognisable.  "  Algy  Banister," 
the  convert  hero  in  The  Conventionalists, 
wore  in  real  life  a  Trinity  Hall  and  not  "  a 
Third  Trinity  scarf."  Benson  had  discovered 
in  him  that  rara  avis  of  the  soul's  flights — 
a  Carthusian  vocation — and  compared  him 
delightfully  to  "  a  delicate  child  that,  un- 
known to  himself,  is  heir  to  a  dukedom." 
Though  the  story  is  imaginative,  it  may 
be  added  as  a  grain  of  fact  that  the  hero 
did  find  the  grace  of  conversion,  though 

61 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLA7E 
not  that  of  his  spiritual  dukedom.  Of  the 
identity  of  "  Christopher  Dell "  in  The 
Sentimentalists,  there  was  never  any  doubt  at 
Cambridge,  for  some  of  the  familiar  con- 
versation of  the  prototype  found  its  way, 
like  hothouse  flowers,  between  the  pages. 
The  setting  was  a  figment,  and  there  were 
intentional  strokes  in  the  draughtsmanship 
sufficient  to  place  it  outside  stark  photog- 
raphy and  within  the  kinder  sphere  of 
caricature.  The  Sentimentalists  was  a  care- 
fully broidered  book,  but  The  Convention- 
alists and  The  Necromancers  were  painted  at 
full  gallop. 

The  Necromancers  represented  a  very  vivid 
and  deliberate  side  in  Father  Benson's  out- 
look on  the  supernatural.  His  acceptance 
of  the  mystery  of  an  unseen  world  com- 
prised a  frank  admission  of  the  unplea- 
santest  truths  of  Spiritualism.  He  believed 
when  he  wrote — "  Evil  spirits  are  at  us  all 
the  time,  trying  to  get  in  at  any  crack 
they  can  find."  His  own  experiences  of 
psychical  research  were  limited  to  the 
profitless  seances  he  had  attended  as  an 
undergraduate.  As  a  Catholic  he  re- 
nounced Spiritualism,  among  other  works 
of  the  Evil  One,  but  his  interest  in  its 
working  did  not  cease,  but  culminated  in 
the  most  gruesome  of  his  novels.  Psychical 
62 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
research  was  to  a  large  extent  a  Cambridge 
product.  It  represented  a  kind  of  per- 
verted reaction  from  the  atheistic  physics 
which  saturate  so  many  of  the  best  brains 
in  the  University.  It  was  an  attempt  to 
probe  the  supernatural  through  other 
mediums  than  the  theological.  Had  Father 
Benson  gone  on  the  Oxford  Mission,  he 
would  probably  have  written  The  Philo- 
sophers instead,  and  The  Ritualists  in  place 
of  The  Conventionalists.  But  Cambridge 
and  Oxford  are  always  poles  apart.  The 
former  is  the  home  of  discovered  causes,  as 
the  latter  houses  those  that  are  lost.  To 
Father  Benson  psychical  research  was  asso- 
ciated, like  Darwinism  and  Puritanism,  with 
the  Cambridge  mentality.  He  was  fond 
of  stating  in  childlike  tones  the  contrast 
between  the  two  Universities  :  "  It  was 
Cambridge  that  produced  the  Reformers, 
and  Oxford  that  b-b-burnt  them  !  " 


BATHER  BENSON  was  never  sorry  to 
•*•  see  agnostics  and  materialists  take  to 
psychical  research  as  a  hobby,  in  the  hope 
that  they  would  some  time  stumble  against 
the  supernatural.  It  was  like  blind  men 
playing  with  fire.  It  was  true  that  they 
might  be  burnt,  but  it  was  also  possible 
that  indirectly  they  might  glimpse  the 
light.  Spiritualism  offered  a  more  exciting 
field  to  his  pen  than  Anglican  Orders. 
Anglican  controversy  became  absurdly  like 
peashooting  an  old  lady  who  had  lost  her 
way,  but  to  attack  Spiritualism  was  to  close 
with  the  Devil  in  person.  For  some  time 
young  dons  and  younger  undergraduates  had 
turned  tables  and  twirled  planchettes  to- 
gether. But  it  chanced  that  a  climax  was 
reached  in  October  1904,  when  a  venerable 
college  ghost  was  actually  evoked  and  exor- 
cised. For  nine  days  the  University  gasped. 
Father  Benson's  subsequent  interest  in  the 
matter  was  only  equalled  by  his  merriment 
on  hearing  that  holy  water  blessed  by 
the  Anglican  Vicar  of  St.  C had  been 


\ 


H.  E.   CARDINAL  'BOURNE 
GIVES   THE   LAST  'BLESSING,   OCT.   23,   1914 


THE     CAMBRIDGE     JPOSTOLATE 

used,  but  had  not  prevailed  against  the 
apparition.  Panic-stricken  youths  after- 
wards supplied  him  with  matter  which 
developed  into  The  Necromancers.  Never 
were  the  symptoms  of  Spiritualism  better  de- 
scribed— the  seeking  for  the  sign — the  grisly 
"  watcher  on  the  threshold,"  and  the  rest. 
"  Cathcart,"  the  advanced  spiritualist,  in 
his  pages,  who  becomes  a  Catholic  after  ten 
years  of  "  devilling,"  was  no  figment,  but 
incidentally  the  only  one  of  Benson's 
originals  to  be  found  in  a  current  Catholic 
Who's  Who.  "  He  believes  in  the  devil  in 
quite  an  extraordinary  way,"  was  Benson's 
summing.  What  he  realised  was  that  the 
type  of  man  who  takes  to  Spiritualism  is 
often  religious,  and  spoils  his  chances  of 
Catholicisation  thereby.  In  a  famous  sen- 
tence he  wrote  :  "  To  go  to  seances  with 
good  intentions  is  like  holding  a  smoking 
concert  in  a  powder-magazine  on  behalf  of 
an  orphan  asylum." 

The  novels  of  the  Cambridge  period  were 
successively  directed  against  ^Estheticism, 
Conventionalism,  Spiritualism,  and  Material- 
ism. These  were  the  modern  sins  which 
seemed  to  cry  for  special  castigation.  In 
what  may  be  held  to  be  his  masterpiece, 
None  Other  Gods,  he  made  light  work  of  this 
world's  Positions  and  Possessions,  written  as 
66 


THE     CAMBRIDGE     JPOSTOLATE 

such  with  capitals.  The  book  opens  with 
one  of  those  atmospheric  vignettes  of  which 
he  was  a  master,  describing  the  great  court 
of  Trinity  when  "  the  fitful  splash  and 
trickle  of  the  fountain  asserts  itself  clearly 
above  the  gentle  rumble  of  Trinity  Street." 
Frank  Guiseley,  the  strangest  and  appar- 
ently most  unmeaning  character  in  the  Ben- 
sonian  gallery,  successively  undergraduate, 
convert,  tramp,  and  mystic,  whose  life 
was  only  lived  to  complete  his  Failure  (a 
word  Benson  could  also  write  in  capitals), 
was  a  composite  in  which  loomed  several  men 
whose  academical  floruit  was  about  1905. 
Everybody  who  was  at  Cambridge  that  year 
will  remember  "  the  affair  of  the  German 
prince  travelling  incognito,  in  which  the 
mayor  himself  had  been  drawn,"  though  it 
was  actually  Zanzibar's  Sultan,  who  was  then 
personated  by  a  rollicking  Trinity  man. 
But  the  popular  oarsman  who  suddenly 
announced  his  conversion  to  his  startled 
friends  was  not,  like  Guiseley,  at  Trinity, 
but  at  the  college  next  door.  The  inter- 
view with  the  Dean  under  circumstances 
of  rigid  politeness,  the  dislike  for  con- 
ventional or  high-placed  people,  the  total 
carelessness  for  success  and  the  camaraderie 
for  life's  castaways,  were  all  drawn  from  a 
unique  and  unforgettable  personality. 


THE     CAMBRIDGE     JPOSTOLATE 

When  pressed,  Father  Benson  would 
never  admit  that  he  purposely  studied 
his  friends,  but  his  vivid  subconsciousness 
reflected  them  whether  he  intended  it  or 
not.  He  never  managed  to  describe  himself, 
though  he  startled  the  critics  of  The  Con- 
ventionalists by  jumping  into  the  book  as  a 
practical  joke  on  them,  and  converting  the 
hero  in  person  !  Perhaps  Monsignor  Dick 
Yolland,  in  the  same  book,  was  an  approach 
to  his  real  or  imaginary  self.  His  con- 
verse with  Christopher  Dell  was  not  un- 
like Benson's  with  difficult  undergraduates. 
Certainly  his  chivalrous  defence  and  help 
of  his  wretched  friend  was  typical  of  the 
human  love  and  sympathy  which  went 
out  so  readily  to  all  "  Bensonians,"  con- 
ventional or  the  reverse,  won  or  lost  to 
Holy  Church. 

It  was  true  that  he  did  not  attract  the  in- 
tellect or  satisfy  the  common  sense  of  the 
University,  though  The  Religion  of  the  Plain 
Man  was  a  passionate  plea  addressed  to  a 
type  which  he  seldom  touched.  However, 
he  was  not  the  first  teacher  who  gathered 
the  wayward  and  wandering  rather  than 
the  self-satisfied  about  him.  The  folk  who 
composed  his  coterie  were  roving  Ritualists, 
aesthetes  with  or  without  a  moral  sense, 
reformers  of  Church  and  State — in  fact,  all 
68 


THE  CAMBRIDGE  JPOSTOLATE 
the  budding  brotherhood  of  cranks,  for  each 
of  whom  he  sought  his  proper  niche  within 
the  multi-moulded  fabric  of  the  Church. 
Even  the  crazy  King's-man  who  interrupted 
Benediction  in  the  Catholic  Church  one 
evening  with  an  appeal  for  brotherhood 
among  Churches  received  more  sympathy 
from  Father  Benson  than  from  some  of 
the  Protestant  pastors,  whose  flocks  he  had 
attempted  to  address  on  the  same  evening. 
"  Peace,  brother  !  "  said  Father  Benson  as 
he  laid  his  hand  on  the  shoulder  of  that 
talented  fanatic,  whom  he  only  believed 
to  be  suffering  from  unconscious  vocation 
to  the  Carmelite  Order.  All  who  were 
striving,  if  not  for  a  new  Heaven  at  least 
for  a  new  Earth,  found  themselves  in  accord 
with  Benson's  working  motto,  that  "  Uncon- 
ventionality  is  the  spice  of  life."  Certainly, 
whether  he  aroused  antagonism  or  devotion 
during  his  second  coming  to  Cambridge,  it 
may  be  said  that,  of  all  prophets  and  re- 
formers who  have  ever  preached  to  her,  no 
one  individual  ever  covered  a  more  meteoric 
and  ecstatic  career  in  so  short  a  time.  He 
was  there  four  years  only.  And  now  he  has 
become  a  legend  among  some  who  were  old 
when  he  came  up.  But  for  many  whom  he 
first  met  as  undergraduates,he  remains  always 
the  symbol  of  their  spiritual  youth  and  his. 


ANECDOTES   OF  HUGH  BENSON 


ANECDOTES  OF  HUGH  BENSON 
<BT  RICHARD   HOfTDEN 


A  THOUGH  in  conversation  Hugh 
Benson  had  a  stammer,  yet  in  the 
pulpit  he  had  not  the  slightest 
hesitation ;  in  fact,  his  eloquence 
was  so  tremendous  and  his  flow  of  perfect 
language  so  continuous,  that  his  listeners 
came  away  overwhelmed  by  the  torrent 
of  words.  He  always  spoke  and  preached 
extemporarily,  although  he  made  copious 
and  profuse  notes  of  his  sermons  and 
speeches  beforehand.  On  only  one  occasion, 
so  he  told  me,  did  his  eloquence  fail  him. 
He  was  preaching,  as  an  Anglican,  in  some 
church,  I  think  in  Brighton,  at  the  time  of 
the  fatal  illness  of  his  father,  the  Arch- 
bishop of  Canterbury.  In  the  middle  of 
his  sermon,  he  felt  himself  entirely  unable 
to  proceed  ;  all  thread  of  his  discourse  had 
gone,  and  after  a  few  stammered  sentences 

73 


ANECDOTES  OF  HUGH  <BENSON 
he  was  forced  to  leave  the  pulpit,  as  he  was 
quite  incapable  of  finishing.  He  was  amazed 
to  find  that  the  moment  the  power  of 
speech  left  him  was  the  moment  his  father 
died.  One  day,  after  I  had  been  present 
in  Westminster  Cathedral,  where  thousands 
had  listened  to  him  spell-bound,  I  asked 
him  what  it  felt  like  to  stand  up  in  the 
pulpit  and  face  that  sea  of  eager,  upturned 
faces,  knowing  it  was  because  he  was  preach- 
ing that  this  enormous  crowd  had  collected. 
He  answered  with  characteristic  curtness, 
"  Oh  !  all  right ;  I  was  in  an  awful  funk,  and 
I  preached  a  rotten  sermon.  Let's  go  to 
lunch  !  " 


74 


II 

HE  was  his  greatest  critic  of  all  he  did, 
and  I  think  the  only  work  accom- 
plished by  him  which  really  satisfied  him, 
was  his  book,  Richard  Raynal,  Solitary.  He 
considered  it  his  finest  work ;  he  wrote  it 
in  three  weeks  ;  and,  with  his  love  for  the 
mystical,  he  was  convinced  he  wrote  it 
under  inspiration.  He  wrote  his  books, 
pamphlets,  and  lectures  with  extraordinary 
rapidity,  and  with  amazing  concentration. 
Entering  his  room  with  some  message  while 
he  was  engaged  in  writing,  I  have  had  to 
call  him  several  times  before  I  was  able  to 
elicit  an  answer.  He  was  very  fond  of 
reading  aloud  to  any  friend  some  part  of 
whatever  he  was  composing — a  chapter 
from  a  new  book,  or  some  article — and 
always  begged  for  a  frank  criticism.  I  can 
see  him  now,  legs  crossed  under  a  rather 
ancient  cassock,  stammering  out  a  story, 
interjected  with  puffs  of  cigarette  smoke, 
and  finishing  up  with  his  enthusiastic  :  "  It 
isn't  bad,  is  it  ?  "  or,  "  My  dear,  what  do 

75 


ANECDOTES  OF  HUGH  BENSON 
you  think  of  this  ?  This  is  r-rather  r-rip- 
ping."  In  other  respects,  too,  he  was 
really  like  an  enthusiastic  schoolboy.  I 
remember  he  lunched  with  me  on  his 
return  from  his  first  American  tour,  where 
his  ardent  American  admirers  presented 
him  with  a  gold  watch  and  chain,  gold 
cigarette-case,  and  some  other  gifts  of 
appreciation.  These  he  produced  one  after 
the  other,  with  the  air  of  a  delighted  boy 
showing  you  his  presents  from  a  rich 
uncle  ! 

He  was  so  utterly  devoid  of  any  kind  of 
"  side."  He  would  work  in  his  garden  at 
Hare  Street,  in  grey  flannel  trousers  and 
the  striped  cricket  shirt  he  had  won  for 
"  College  "  when  at  Eton  ;  and  whoever 
came,  be  it  cardinal,  lady,  or  layman,  all 
were  received  then  and  there,  and  car- 
ried off  in  enthusiastic  haste  to  be  shown 
the  latest  improvements  to  the  chapel,  or 
house,  or  garden.  The  Hare  Street  house 
was  entirely  like  him  and  of  him.  Every 
corner  showed  his  versatility.  Here  was  a 
bedroom,  the  walls  hung  with  fantastic 
weird  tapestry,  which  he  had  designed  and 
made  and  put  up  with  his  own  hands. 
Again,  some  carved  oaken  panels  which  he 
himself  had  carved.  His  bed  was  Jacobean, 
with  blue  hangings  and  the  emblems  of 


the  Passion  on  the  four  posts  ;  the  stair- 
case panelled  and  carved  with  heraldic  and 
sacred  designs  ;  the  chapel — the  Mecca  of 
his  love — overflowing  with  carvings,  statues, 
fashioned  by  his  own  hands.  The  rather 
rough  screen,  and  choir  stalls,  made  out  of 
odd  pieces  of  oak  he  had  picked  up,  the 
organ  loft,  containing  the  harmonium  pre- 
sented to  him  by  an  eminent  English 
comedian  (one  of  his  many  converts),  all 
were  fashioned  and  erected  with  the  help 
of  his  wonderful  man  of  all  work,  and  of 
any  friend  who  was  staying  with  him.  He 
who  never  knew  what  it  was  to  have  an 
idle  moment  pressed  into  service  of  some 
kind  all  who  were  with  him.  I  have  known 
him  in  one  day  write  a  score  of  letters, 
finish  a  novel,  shoot  with  a  neighbouring 
squire,  carve  a  panel,  play  the  piano,  and 
smoke — well,  how  many  cigarettes  ! — he 
smoked  feverishly  and  incessantly — and  yet, 
with  all  this,  he  placed  the  exact  perform- 
ance of  his  religious  duties  before  every- 
thing else. 

His  Mass  he  said  at  eight ;  breakfast  in 
silence  was  at  nine,  after  which  he  dealt 
with  his  correspondence,  which  was  tre- 
mendous :  I  have  known  him  to  have 
fifty  letters  by  the  morning  post.  This 
task  accomplished,  he  would  write  at  some 

77 


ANECDOTES  OF  HUGH  'BENSON 
novel  or  article,  then  go  into  the  chapel  to 
say  the  Little  Hours  before  luncheon  at  one. 
Luncheon  was  usually  taken  in  silence 
unless  there  was  some  stranger  whose  pres- 
ence needed  the  relaxation  of  this  rule. 
After  luncheon,  manual  labour  in  the  garden 
or  about  the  house,  and  the  carving,  paint- 
ing or  tapestry-making  was  done.  Tea  at 
four,  and  then  writing  again  until  dinner 
at  eight,  which  was  not  taken  in  silence. 
That  over,  all  would  adjourn  to  the  delight- 
ful oak-floored  parlour,  where,  amid  cigarette 
smoke,  he  would  read  either  extracts  from 
the  novel  he  was  working  at,  or  from  some 
other  book,  or  perhaps  talk  in  his  entrancing 
manner  about  some  psychic  problem  which 
was  interesting  him.  Then  the  chapel  bell 
would  ring,  and  all  would  go  and  thank  God 
for  a  day  so  happily  spent.  I  can  see  him 
now,  kneeling  very  erect  and  intent,  read- 
ing with  extraordinary  rapidity  the  Night 
Prayers,  his  only  light  a  wooden  standard 
candlestick  placed  close  to  him  on  the  red- 
tiled  uneven  floor.  The  Prayers  finished, 
he  would  kneel  on,  his  eyes  fixed  on  the 
Tabernacle,  and  you  could  positively  feel 
him  beseeching  Heaven  on  behalf  of  the 
many  souls  under  his  care,  and  imploring 
help  to  carry  out  to  the  uttermost  his 
spiritual  motto  :  "  God's  Holy  Will  be 

78 


ANECDOTES     OF    HUGH    BENSON 

done."  He  certainly  practised  what  he 
preached.  The  keynote,  so  to  speak,  of  his 
life  was  his  favourite  expression,  "  Nothing 
matters  in  this  world,  my  dear,  except  the 
doing  of  God's  Will,"  and  he  most  willingly 
and  humbly  resigned  himself  to  whatever 
he  felt  was  the  Divine  Will  for  him. 


79 


Ill 

Ar  the  beginning  of  the  European  War, 
he  offered  his  services  to  the  War 
Office  as  an  army  chaplain.  To  his  un- 
usually highly  strung  and  nervous  tempera- 
ment there  was  nothing  more  repugnant  to 
him,  or  terrifying,  than  having  to  face  the 
horrors  of  the  battlefield.  "  I  had  a  beastly 
day,"  he  wrote  to  me.  "  I  volunteered, 
heard  nothing,  then  suddenly  had  a  wire 
asking  me  where  I  was,  and  where  a  letter 
would  find  me  ;  and  I  was  convinced  it 
was  from  the  War  Office.  Well,  it  was ; 
but  it  wasn't  about  that.  But  for  twenty- 
four  hours  I  was  terrified,  made  my  last 
testament,  wrote  letters.  But  I  didn't 
really  mind,  because  I  willed  to  go." 
And  so  it  was  all  through  his  life ;  he 
indeed  might  be  called  the  Apostle  of  the 
Will. 

He  loved  all  religious,  but  especially  the 
Carthusians  ;  he  made  many  retreats  at  the 
Charterhouse  at  Parkminster  in  Sussex, 
and  several  of  his  spiritual  children  have 
80 


ANECDOTES     OF     HUGH    BENSON 

tried  their  vocations  at  that  haven  of 
rest.  His  own  house  at  Hare  Street  was 
chaffingly  termed  by  some  of  his  friends 
"  The  halfway  house  to  Parkminster," 
several  men  who  had  lived  with  him  having 
gone  on  to  test  their  vocation  for  self- 
oblivion  among  the  followers  of  St.  Bruno. 
Some  accused  him,  inevitably,  but  unjustly, 
of  being  too  much  of  an  idealist  in  dealing 
with  the  spiritual  life  of  others.  If  he  put 
before  his  spiritual  children  the  great 
heights  attainable  by  the  soul  even  whilst 
under  the  bondage  of  the  flesh,  he  tempered 
these  aspirations  both  for  himself  and  for 
them  with  healthy  and  practical  common 
sense.  He  had  that  entirely  delightful  yet  un- 
common combination  of  the  practical  man  of 
the  world  and  the  dreamer  of  dreams.  When 
he  stayed  at  Cambridge  he  joined  the  under- 
graduates at  the  bathing  place,  swimming 
and  diving  like  an  exultant  boy  ;  or,  again, 
on  his  holiday  he  would  intrepidly  climb  a 
Swiss  mountain — and  an  hour  later  would 
be  weaving  a  romance  with  picturesque 
phrase  and  mystical  expression.  He  preached 
his  famous  course  of  sermons  "  The  Re- 
ligion of  the  Plain  Man "  at  the  Sunday 
evening  service  at  Cambridge,  and  crowds 
of  members  of  the  University  came  to 
hear  him.  He  was  a  favourite  guest  in 
F  81 


ANECDOTES     OF     HUGH    'BENSON 

College  Common  Rooms  among  the  dons, 
and  also  an  ever  welcomed  partaker  of  under- 
graduate hospitality,  quite  as  happy  to  be 
discussing  the  relative  values  of  motor  cars 
with  an  exquisite  in  Trinity,  as  in  arguing 
some  historical  problem  with  some  eminent 
professor,  or,  again,  convincing  an  aspiring 
senior  wrangler  that  there  was  something 
higher  and  more  important  than  higher 
mathematics. 

Then  and  always  Robert  Hugh  Benson's 
manners  were  delightfully  free,  charming 
and  courteous.  He  had  that  rare  gift  of 
making  you  feel  in  conversation  that  what 
you  were  saying  was  of  real  moment  to 
him ;  so  he  gave  you  his  full  attention, 
and  his  kind  and  constant  "  How  interest- 
ing "  put  you  at  your  ease.  Yet  he  did  not 
suffer  fools  gladly,  if  he  felt  they  were  foolish 
through  their  own  wilful  stupidity  or  conceit. 
He  loathed  "  side  "  in  any  form,  especially 
what  he  termed  "  spiritual  side."  I  can 
honestly  and  truthfully  say  I  never  heard 
him  say  an  unkind  word  about  anyone  ;  it 
was  always  "  A  nice  man  that."  At  the 
children's  parties  held  at  Hare  Street  his 
delight  was  to  invent  some  new  kind  of 
game  for  them.  Well  I  remember  the 
merriest  of  Christmas  teas  he  arranged  for 
his  little  ward,  with  candles,  Christmas 
82 


ANECDOTES  OF  HUGH  <BENSON 
cake,  and  Santa  Claus  impersonated  by  his 
dear  friend  and  secretary,  Dr.  Sessions. 
Animals  he  loved.  He  was  a  good  rider, 
and  an  excellent  shot,  and,  of  course,  he 
enjoyed  to  its  full  a  motor  ride.  For  what- 
ever he  did,  he  did  with  extraordinary 
keenness  and  pleasure,  doing  all  things  for 
the  greater  glory  of  God. 


NOTES 


MR.  SHANE  LESLIE,  whose  per- 
sonal memories  of  Mgr.  Benson's 
Cambridge    Apostolate   are    here 
first  printed,  contributed  to  the 
Tablet  (3ist  October,  1914),  anonymously, 
an    article    from    which    we    quote    these 
passages  : 

WE  cannot  imagine  he  was  not  glad  and  inter- 
ested at  the  prospect  of  death,  though  he 
may  have  suffered  a  slight  regret  (shared  by  all  his 
readers)  that  it  was  not  granted  to  him  to  describe 
the  supreme  experience  which  biology  calls  death, 
but  theology  speaks  of  only  in  terms  of  life. 

AT  Eton  he  won  the  prize  for  a  poem  on 
Father  Damien.  It  was  his  only  achieve- 
ment at  the  school  where  his  name,  cut  on  the 
Fourth  Form  panels,  was  until  recently  pointed 
out  to  American  visitors  with  the  mysterious  ex- 
planation, "  The  Priest  !  "  At  Eton  he  ambitioned 
to  enter  the  Indian  Civil.  The  Xavier  lay  buried 
in  the  Clive — the  missionary  in  the  adventurer. 
When  the  Divine  Adventure  offered  itself  later,  all 
his  desires  were  fulfilled. 


SUMMARY  and  parallels  fail  in  the  case  of 
Robert  Hugh  Benson.  He  stood  in  religious 
symbolism  to  his  time.  He  could  not  have  been 
a  Victorian.  He  was  of  the  commencement  de  sihle, 
and  nothing  else.  He  was  an  ecclesiastical  Winston 
Churchill,  to  whom  he  was  curiously  comparable, 
even  to  the  stutter,  commanding  and  conquering 
men's  attention  against  their  will.  In  each  case  a 
father's  son  made  his  father  memorable  for  his  son. 
Both  Archbishop  Benson  and  Lord  Randolph 
Churchill  had  given  the  systems  with  which  their 
names  arc  perpetuated  their  most  famous  mots ; 
and  the  sons  reversed  their  utterances  by  their 
personal  achievement.  By  a  supreme  peripateia 
both  passed  over  to  the  rival  camps,  and  both 
claimed  in  their  writings  that  in  doing  what  they 
ought  not  to  have  done  as  sons,  they  as  heirs  had 
found  the  only  use  and  outlet  for  their  fathers' 
legacies. 

II 

WHEN  photography  was  a  newer  art,  the 
unused  sitter  might  be  pardoned  a 
self-consciousness  which  familiarity  with  the 
camera  has  dispelled.  Cardinal  Manning 
used  to  say  that  the  time  when  the  cap  of 
the  camera  was  removed  was  the  only  time 
when  a  man  (with  an  emphasis  on  the 
sitter's  musculinity)  felt  a  fool.  Of  the 
later  generation  of  men,  who  perhaps  feel 
less  foolish  than  bored,  Monsignor  Benson 
made  a  good  sitter,  perfectly  natural  in  his 

85 


3^0  TES 

expression,  neither  inanely  smiling  nor  of  so 
unwonted  a  gravity  as  to  be  enjoined  to 
say,  like  Little  Dorrit,  "  Papa,  potatoes, 
prunes,  and  prison,"  in  order  to  give  the 
mouth  a  sweet  and  smiling  version.  These 
photographs  recall  in  some  particulars  an 
even  more  meticulous  portrait  —  that  of 
Father  Campion  in  The  Guide  Book  and  the 
Star  : 

WELL,  first,  he's  a  most  boyish-looking 
person  for  his  age — he's  thirty-nine,  Dick 
told  me  so — but  he  looks  about  twenty-two.  He's 
medium  height,  and  blond,  with  straight  butter- 
coloured  hair  (no  doubt  his  mother  calls  it  golden) 
which  needs  cutting.  His  face  is  rather  full  and 
more  oval  than  square.  There's  no  loose  skin  on 
it.  He  has  light  blue,  shining  eyes,  badly  shaped, 
and  with  no  depth  in  them.  They  are  a  little 
prominent.  His  nose  makes  his  whole  face 
youthful.  It's  short,  aquiline,  and  has  arched 
nostrils.  His  mouth  is  confusing — a  fascinating 
mouth.  It's  tender  and  dogged  ;  sensitive  and  yet 
shapeless  ;  emotional  but  rigid.  The  upper-lip  is 
like  that  of  a  shy  child  ;  the  under-lip  suggests  an 
aggressive  despot.  It  juts  out  a  little,  as  if  there 
were  a  lump  of  sugar  between  it  and  the  gum. 
It's  the  mouth  of  a  man  who  could  bite  ;  but  he'd 
bite  with  tears  in  his  eyes. 

THE  expression  of  the  whole  face  is  odd.     You 
know    what    importance   I   attach    to   ex- 
pression.    His   is   a  kind   of  suppressed   eagerness 
86 


which  seems  to  vary  either  to  suppression  minus 
the  eagerness,  when  his  face  becomes  mask-like,  or 
to  eagerness  minus  the  suppression,  when  he  lights 
up  with  a  white-hot  keenness  that  arouses  atten- 
tion. However,  the  normal  expression  strikes  a 
happy  mean  ;  neither  cold  nor  hot,  but  a  kind  of 
pink  temperature. 

HE  has  a  habit  of  thrusting  out  his  chin,  and 
he  stammers  a  little  :  not  apologetically  or 
painfully,  as  most  people  do,  but  quite  cheerfully. 
He  doesn't  mind  at  all.     "Let  the  conversation 
w-w-wait  until  he's  g-got  the  w-word  out." 


TN  the  same  brilliant  and  Bensonian  little 
•*•  book,  Mrs.  Lindsay's  heroine  brings 
against  an  imaginary  author  ("  D.  L. 
Lawley  ")  the  charges  pressed  home,  on 
occasion,  to  the  author  of  The  Sentimen- 
talists ;  and  —  what  makes  these  charges 
most  noticeable  here  —  her  "  Father  Cam- 
pion "  is  himself  heard  in  reply  : 

A  5  I  came  home,  I  overtook  Father  Campion. 
He  was  leaning  on  a  gate,  staring  out  over 
a  wilderness  of  ploughed  fields  which  stretched 
away  to  the  horizon  like  a  crinkled  brown  sea. 
He  turned  when  I  came  up  to  him,  and  we  walked 
back  together.  I  told  him  that  I  had  been  reading 
The  Fishermen,  and  he  asked  me  what  I  thought  of 
it.  I  said  what  I  have  said  to  you.  He  listened 
with  a  curious  little  air  of  intense  interest  which 

87 


FUNERAL, 


VDBER  23,  1914. 


he  always  wears  when  anybody  is  talking  to  him. 
It  makes  one  expand  like  a  sponge.  When  I  said 
that  I  thought  there  was  something  horribly  off 
the  straight  line  in  the  way  Sidney  Fairfax  was 
deliberately  marked  down  and  inveigled  and  coerced, 
he  said  that  he  quite  agreed  with  me,  which  com- 
pletely threw  me  off  my  bearings.  As  he  was 
looking  at  me  just  then  he  saw  it,  and  asked 
whether  that  surprised  me.  I  said  that  it  did  : 
that,  considering  he  was  a  Roman  Catholic  priest 
it  sounded  disloyal ;  and  then  it  was  his  turn  to 
look  surprised,  and  he  asked  me  what  on  earth  I 
meant,  and  disloyal  to  whom  or  to  what  ? 

HE  thought  I  was  mixing  up  two  separate 
ideas ;  the  Catholic  Church  and  the  people 
in  it ;  and,  although  Catholics  owed  the  most 
absolute  loyalty  to  the  Church,  he  wasn't  aware 
that  they  owed  any  special  loyalty  to  each  other, 
beyond  a  natural  loyalty  if  they  happened  to  be 
personal  friends.  He  added  that  there  was  every 
distinction  between  the  Church  and  the  people  in 
it.  It  was  by  no  means  one  and  the  same  thing. 

FATHER  CAMPION  said  one  thing  just 
before  we  got  home  that  struck  me  as  very 
true.  He  said  that  if  there  was  one  thing  he  dis- 
believed in,  it  was  controversy  on  subjects  of  re- 
ligion. That  if  people  were  interested  and  wanted 
to  know  things  they  could  always  find  a  way  for 
themselves  :  they  would  either  read  or  ask  ;  and  if 
they  were  not  interested,  then  it  was  just  con- 
founded impertinence  to  cram  such  very  personal 
matters  down  their  throats. 
90 


3^0  TES 
III 

/TpHE  allusion  made  to  Monsignor  Benson 
•*•  as  an  apostle  of  the  Will  of  Man  may 
be  further  illustrated  in  his  own  Preface  to 
Miss  Mary  Samuel  Daniel's  intimate  story, 
Choice : 

THE  most  inalienable  gift  that  the  rational 
soul  possesses  is  that  of  Choice.  All  other 
faculties  may  wax  and  wane ;  the  intellect  may 
be  now  illuminated,  now  obscured ;  there  are 
moments  when  it  thinks  itself  capable  of  solving 
all  mysteries  ;  there  are  moments  when  it  cannot 
grasp  even  a  truism.  So  with  the  emotions — the 
tide  of  feeling  rises  and  falls  with  health,  circum- 
stances, companionships  ;  it  runs  dry  in  the  presence 
of  those  whom  it  loves ;  it  rises  to  the  brim  in 
solitude.  But  the  will  is  always  itself — acting  and 
choosing — and  cannot  cease :  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  indecisiveness  in  reality — it  is  no  less  than 
a  rapid  alternation  of  decisions.  Ultimately,  there- 
fore, the  rational  soul  becomes,  not  what  it  neces- 
sarily understands,  nor  what  it  superficially  loves — 
but  that  which  it  chooses. 

CONFRONTED  by  that  Phenomenon  which 
confronts  always,  sooner  or  later,  in  our 
own  country  and  generation,  all  who  are  fearlessly 
searching  for  truth — the  Phenomenon  of  Catholi- 
cism. At  first  she  is  attracted  by  it  ;  she  has 
escaped  the  entanglements  of  controversy,  and  the 
persuasion  of  relatives,  and  the  drag  of  old  pre- 
judice ;  and  she  becomes  aware,  directly  and  over- 

91 


whelmingly,  that  its  very  overpoweringness  is  to 
her  an  argument  against  its  truth.  How  can  such 
things  be  true  ?  ...  As  she  proceeds  further  she 
finds  much  in  the  system  that  repels  her  ;  truth,  if 
this  is  truth,  presents  to  her  brutal,  fantastic  and 
even  childishly  ugly  aspects.  Neither  head  nor 
heart  seem  consistent  with  themselves  ;  now  she 
thinks  she  understands ;  now  she  knows  she  does 
not :  now  she  almost  hates  the  Christian  Creed  ; 
now  she  thinks  that  the  sorrow  of  the  Cross  and 
the  broken  Body  of  Christ  alone  promise  help  and 
consolation.  Yet  all  the  while,  it  is  in  her  Will, 
though  she  does  not  know  it — not  in  her  head  or 
heart  that  the  scene  of  conflict  lies.  She  believes 
that  she  must  be  "  true  to  herself,"  and  does  not 
understand  that  she  must  "  deny  herself,"  if  she 
would  be  true  to  God.  To  and  fro,  then,  she 
moves,  till  it  seems  as  if  there  were  no  possibility 
of  decision.  Then — she  decides.  Her  whole  char- 
acter moveSy  and  not  a  part  of  it  only. 


IV 

MONSIGNOR  BENSON  had  a  hand- 
writing as  proper  to  himself  as  was 
Dickens's  handwriting  to  Dickens.  Both 
avoided  the  slovenliness  to  which  Bulwer 
Lytton  long  ago  lamented  that  novelists 
must  descend.  Shakespeare,  we  are  now 
assured  by  all  uncured  Baconians,  could 
not,  as  a  mere  matter  of  mechanism,  have 
written  all  his  plays,  so  laborious  was  his  cal- 
92 


ligraphy  ;  and  similarly  Monsignor  Benson's 
inevitable  flourishes  might  be  urged  against 
the  possibilities  of  that  unfailing  pile  of 
manuscript  on  manuscript. 


^»0ri 


**'    JwaJM^, 

tjjjdwgw- 

****** 

The  sentence  here  reproduced  (a  little 
"  smaller  than  life ")  is  taken  from  a 
letter  written  about  a  year  ago  :  "  I  am 
being  obliged  to  draw  in  my  horns,  and 
economise  time  and  everything  else  just 
now,  as  I  am  on  the  very  edge  of  my 
capacities."  At  unbroken  speed  he  re- 
mained at  that  perilous  pitch  until  the 
inevitable  catastrophe  came  which  was  by 
only  him  undreaded. 

93 


AZOTES 

V 

WHEN,  in  1890,  Robert  Hugh  Benson 
entered  Trinity  College,  Cambridge, 
there  entered  also  another  future  novelist, 
Mr.  Archibald  Marshall,  whose  memories  of 
his  old  friend,  published  in  the  Cornbill 
Magazine,  include  a  little  passage  of  colour 
— even  the  red  of  Rome.  The  freshman, 
who  still  looked  like  a  schoolboy,  with  "  a 
tangled  mop  of  fair  hair,  quick  stammering 
speech,  and  a  shy  but  attractive  manner," 
and  who  "  always  walked  very  fast  and 
appeared  to  be  busy,"  thought  even  then 
that  "  it  would  be  nice  to  write  stories  and 
get  money  for  them  "  ;  but  "  he  said  that 
what  he  would  really  like  to  be  was  a 
Cardinal." 

T  TE  thought,  too,  even  then,  about 
psychic  phenomena,  purposely  oc- 
cupying rooms  in  which  a  demented  man 
had  shot  himself,  in  the  hope  that  he  might 
see  his  ghost.  Once,  when  riding  with 
his  friend  through  Vauxhall,  "  Hugh  dis- 
covered himself  to  be  on  fire  from  a  pipe 
he  had  put  alight  into  his  pocket " — an 
almost  Francis-Thompsonian  reminiscence. 
But  if  he  had  his  absent-mindednesses,  he 

94 


had  also  his  intentnesses.  He  argued  hotly. 
In  the  smoking-room  at  Addington  "  some- 
times the  discussion  waxed  rather  warm. 
Hugh  and  one  of  the  chaplains  once  ended 
by  falling  out  rather  seriously.  The  next 
day  Hugh  went  away  for  a  few  days  with 
the  breach  still  unhealed."  When  he  re- 
turned, the  chaplain  admitted  his  own 
wrongness,  and  said  he  had  bought  Hugh 
a  box  of  beautiful  cigarettes  to  make  up. 
Then  a  repentant  smile  broke  out  over  the 
chaplain's  face  as  he  added,  "  But  they  were 
so  good  that  I'm  afraid  I  have  smoked 
them  all " — not  the  only  occasion  when 
Hugh  learned  the  useful  lesson  to  take  the 
will  for  the  deed. 

MR.  MARSHALL  bears  an  outsider's 
witness  to  the  benignant  develop- 
ment of  his  friend  when  and  after  he 
reached  the  home  of  his  soul.  The  dis- 
putant in  him,  fortunately,  did  not  die  ; 
but  it  was  mellowed,  and,  being  ripened, 
also  sweetened.  One  of  the  last  letters 
Mr.  Marshall  had  from  him,  not  many 
months  before  his  death,  was  in  acknow- 
ledgment of  a  story  of  religious  experience, 
alien  to  his  own.  "  His  letter  began, 
'  Your  book  has  come,  and  I  like  it  enor- 
mously. It  is  gentle  and  Christian  and 

95 


^Co  TES 

interesting  and  happy.'  I  am  quite  sure 
that  fifteen  years  ago  he  would  have  argued 
hotly  with  me  about  it."  In  recent  inter- 
course, therefore,  the  friends  became 
nearer : — "  I  found  him  an  even  more 
delightful  companion  than  he  was  during 
the  years  of  which  I  have  written,"  and 
what  had  vanished  with  his  Anglicanism 
was  "  a  certain  friction  that  made  itself 
felt  before  Hugh  finally  found  what  I 
believe  to  have  been  his  true  vocation  in 
life.  He  had  a  very  dominating  will,  and 
had  not  always  been  easy  to  live  with ; 
but  he  seemed  to  me  to  have  acquired,  of 
late  years,  a  self-reliance  that  was  very 
different  in  its  effects  from  the  opinionative- 
ness  that  had  stood  in  its  place  before.  He 
had  the  most  lovable  qualities,  and  they 
seemed  to  shine  out  in  him  more  and  more 
each  time  that  we  came  together." 


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